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Rod, Gun, and Palette
in the High Rockies

Being a record of an Artist's

Impressions in the Land of

the Red Gods

BY JAMES BLOMFIELD

Published by W. E. WROE

Chicago

1914

Copyright, 19 14
By William E. Wroe

r73q

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Soon after my return from Montana in the late fall of 1913, I showed to
my artist friend, Mr. James Blomfield, some photo-prints which I had made
along the Madison river and in the Teepee basin during late September and
early October.

He was much impressed by them, and voiced the hope that some day he
might be able to visit the section, and paint the rolling prairie vistas and em-
battled walls which the clear mountain air had permitted the camera to record.
As 1 had long desired one or two canvases that would be typical of the
section, 1 then suggested to him that he arrange to accompany me the follow-
ing fall, well knowing also that my own enjoyment of the trip would be greatly en-
hanced by the presence and influence of one who combined a keen appreciation
of the wondrous beauty of the vast outdoors with the rare ability to make
permanent with pigment and canvas the fleeting moods of the landscape's hour.
He accepted the invitation then extended, and joined my genial friend Mr.
Arthur L. Pratt and myself on the visit which we made to the same region in
September and October of the present year.

This last was by far the most pleasant trip which 1 have ever made into
this country, which 1 have visited annually for a number of years, and was made
so by the companionship and work of the peiinter man. I found myself hanging
about him and his work, constantly fascinated with the free though faithful
handling of his color, and by his ability to preserve not only form and aerial
distance, but also all the related substances of matter as Nature assembles them
in the atmosphere appeared to be sensed by him, and unconsciously expressed
through his brush.

Mr. Blomfield made some twenty-three studies in oil and water color,
besides a book full of pencil sketches during the month he was with us, all of
which were most satisfying to one who knows and loves the country at the
time late fall, as chief femme du chambre, arranges the morning gowns and
evening robes for Mistress Earth.

He was vacationing at his work, and the country and the air at the 6,700
and 8,000 foot elevations, at which it weis done, were both a joy and an inspira-
tion to him. He seemed to hear and understand the tongueless tattle of the
vibrant mornings and the solemn speech of the sentinel hills at evening. As
science has proven to us that sound and color are akin, so 1 may say that to me,
Mr. Blomfield caught and fastened in a frame the songs of the waters and the
wooded slopes, so that we may listen with our eyes.

Mr. Blomfield also kept a log of our trip, and I found his pen as facile as
his brush, and that his log very naturally carried some splendid word pictures
of the constantly changing environment of prairie, butte, stream, and moun-
tain, in all their variation of tone and color as an artist saw them every day.
He has written so charmingly and honestly of our simple camp life, its small
events and good companionship, and enriched it with so many descriptions of the
fields and hills as they smiled or sulked in alternate sun and shade that I deter-
mined to produce his log in permanent form. Mr. Blomfield has most kindly
added to it a number of rapid pen drawings, from his own sketches.

I hope that the printing of this log will vivify the aflFection of its readers
for the great outdoors, and the outdoor life.

It will do that, I am sure, for every one who has already tasted the nectar
of the hills at morn, and if perchance some starved soul should scan this log
who has heretofore by choice denied himself the hills and streams for town, and
then, resolving to mend his ways, shall turn for himself with reverence and with
joy the leaves of the Great Open Book, I shall be glad.

WILLIAM E. WROE

Chicago, November 1914.

313

THE CONTENTS

Page

The Publisher's Note . 1

The First Day 5

In the Mountains . 15

The First Camp 21

Things About Camp . 24

Two Days Together 34

A Trip From Camp 41

The Second Camp 45

Comments and Stories 50

Two Casual Days 55

The Artist Goes A-Fishing 60

A Ceimp Sunday 67

New Experiences 71

Hitting the Trail 76

The High Places 83

The Content of Quiet Days 86

Mainly of Elk 92

Good-Bye, Camp Tepee 94

Three Quiet Days 99

An Interlude .108

Farewell to the Mountains 113

LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing Page
' 'Through a valley to which the hills here descend is visible a yet farther

range" 21

"At evening the tones change to deepest violet" 45

Eastward from Second Camp at evening 67

"Old Baldy — an aristocrat of the hills" 83

THE FIRST DAY

"Who hath smelled wood smoke at twiHght; who hath

heard the birch log burning.
Who is quick to read the noises of the night.
O, let him follow after, for the young men's feet

are turning
To the camps of proved desire and known delight."

This day, Sunday, September 13, 1914, aboard the Overland
Limited of the Union Pacific Railroad, some time after ten o'clock
in the morning, and west of Columbus, Neb., the last place whose
name the writer caught, begins this chronicle of the adventurers
into the land of the Red Gods, whose faring forth commenced
on the 12th.

It will be a journal, a running comment, a narrative, or a
series of paragraphic digressions, all according to the way the
writer feels, and the exigencies of travel and camp life let him, in the
course of which he is apt to shift from the first to the third person,
from the impersonally narrative to the personally meditative by
turns, as the spirit moves him, regardless of the academic demands
of literary unity.

The three men primarily
concerned are thus identified:

WiUiam E. Wroe (Bill)
of Chicago; Arthur L. Pratt
(Art) of Kalamazoo, Mich.,
makers of papers and fish
and some other stories alike
of an exceeding wonderful-
ness; and James Blomfield
(Jim), the guest of the said
Bill, Englishman, artist, in-
diter and limner hereof, and
a resident of Chicago, but
otherwise not convicted of
any crime.

On the edge of evening,
the day before this present.

Page 5

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

thus began for me, the artist, the events hereafter following.
In the midst of afternoon tea-drinking (as is my English habit) at
a near by house, came this scrap of dialogue, breaking in on my
discourse:

"Take that phone, Fred," from my respected hostess.

"As I was saying, mother," I endeavor to continue.

"Nancy wants you on the phone, Jim."

Mrs. Jim beats me to it. "Oh, Jim. Nancy says Adam is
at the house for you. ALL RIGHT, Nancy. Tell Adam to
wait. We'll come right over."

Then follow good-byes, and a sharp walk.

"Good afternoon, Adam."

"Oh, Auntie Mate," excitedly suggests Nancy, "let's ride
two blocks down with Uncle Jim."

They do. At the end of the appointed two blocks there are
two more good-byes and the business of waving a cap.

In five minutes Adam pulls up in front of my friend Wroe's
house. I enter. Wroe, an overcoat over his arm, greets me. "All
ready?"

"Yes."

"Let's take a last look round." And Bill makes a careful
scrutiny, halting with evident suspicion in front of an inoffensive
tobacco jar on the table, but concludes it's all right.

Then follows Sheridan Road with its homeward bound stream
of automobiles, the slanting sun lying in golden bands across the
asphalt. Lincoln Park swims in a floating golden haze broken
by vibrantly violet bulks of trees and half hidden buildings. Com-
ment on the new apartment building at the south end of the park
towering above the trees. The large last gleam of evening sun
on the big bay of the Lake Shore^Drive. Adam bores right along
— steady as a locomotive engineer. I comment on Adam's
steadiness. No temperament.

"No," agrees Bill. "Adam is nearly an ideal chaflFeur that
way."

The word "temperament* recalls a conversation at Wroe's
house a couple of evenings before. The men were talking golf.
I said that Ouimet, the champion, was said to be stolid and devoid
of imagination.

"Sure," confirmed Wroe. "It takes that kind to play the

The First Day

best golf. A man with the slightest temperament or receptivity
goes all to pieces." And in the next minute's conversation he
demonstrated that by the sheer necessity of the game, all the
great golf players could be little more than perfectly co-ordinated
muscular machines.

Now comes Rush Street, with its vista of the downtown towers
and blocks, in gray silhouettes spiring into the upper air, goldenly
luminous, across the half-seen blur of Rush Street bridge on the
street level. Wroe is open in admiration of its poetry — not a
bit bashful before me in showing how much he really feels the
passing romance of a casual street end, the marching procession
of towers down the long far-seen front of Michigan Avenue, or
the last flash of sunlight on some curl of cloud or lift of wave
above the smoke bank, or the city's evening-thrown shadow on
the lake front.

At the Blackstone Hotel I am introduced to Art, of genially
large presence and fresh-colored, whose cheerful, boy-like smile,
jovial greeting, and handclasp prophesy eloquently of the good
fellowship to come, perchance in the closeness of camp life to
attain later to the full flower of friendship, for Art is a man who
inspires liking on sight. I meet also the charming Mrs. Pratt and

her sister. Time presses. Art
climbs into the machine. There
are some more good-byes. The
ladies wave a gay farewell. Pres-
ently we reach the North West-
ern Depot. At the baggage
counter, after an exchange of a
few words, Wroe turns to me,
and says :

"They won't check that

bundle of yours, Jimmy. They

say it isn't baggage — it 's freight."

"What's the trouble?"

"Think it's those wood

panels" (two dozen, and a couple

of stretched canvases, wrapped

and corded in blankets.)

'Art" Myself to baggage clerk, as

8 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

he brings back the offending package to be by us taken into the
car: "Why won't you check this?"

"Baggage master says it's pictures and picture frames, and
it's freight."

"Heavens, man. It's only the blank canvases, and some
panels to make pictures on. And as it travels with me, it seems
I'm entitled to have it checked."

"It ain't baggage."

"How do you define baggage?"

"Wearing apparel."

"Oh! Whatinell do you do to the commercial travelers^
then?"

Wroe and Pratt both grin at my Parthian shot, which is all
the satisfaction I get out of it.

"Train's ready, now, gentlemen."

Steam ; bells ; lights ; red cap, dark face ; cheerful grin ; compart-
ment; luggage rack and a length of string, and we lash a rod case
so it won't fall off on to the berth beneath; other disposal of
belongings; dining car; bill.

Wroe: "You need a bit of training down."

Arthur (in muttered response): " . "

Wroe: "Well, any man who has taken as young and pretty
a wife as you have ought to be willing to cut something on his diet
so she won't feel uncomfortable," and the two men jest with each
other like a pair of schoolboys, with an aside to me from Wroe
as to what "Art" may or may not be expected to do in camp,
which we will reach the evening of the 1 5 th.

"Jimmy, this is Mr. Ellicott." Thus William, as he intro-
duces a friend of his to Art and myself. Ellicott is thin, tall, with
gray eyes set a bit forward in their orbits, a clipped grayish black
mustache with straight mouth under it — pleasant smile and a
good handclasp; gives one a slight impression of not being able
to eat all he would like to, but making a cheerful best of a bad job
that isn't his fault. Interested in electrical power plants — big
installations — thinks in terms of tens of thousands of horsepower;
talks types of turbines to me. I'm interested.

"Yes, it is a bit wonderful when you come to think of it, that
such a simple mechanical proposition as the revolution of a core
of soft iron within a coil or a number of assembled coils of iron

The First Day

"Bill"

or copper wire should pro-
duce such a tremendous
power. Yes, you're quite
right — no electrical engineer
living knows why it should
be so, or what electrical power
is. All we really know for
sure is that when we do
given things, certain effects
follow. A cold motor? No
such thing. Yes, I remember
the Bidwell cold motor, stock
in which was sold extensively
some years ago but it was a
fake. You can't make a
journal that won't heat under
friction, however light, sooner
or later. Where two surfaces bear on each other, there must
be friction, and you'll see perpetual motion about as soon as
friction with out heat."

In the smoking car, from myself: "Do any of you play
pedro?"

"Haven't heard of it in years. Review the points."

"Good," says Bill. "EUicott, you and 1 will show Art and
Jimmy here how to play this game."

The game concluded, the question arises of who's going to
have the upper berth, lower berth, and lounge respectively
in the compartment set apart for the adventuring triad. Art
looks wistful as the lower berth is enumerated. Art is, recumbent^
a bit wide midships, not to mention height and vertical displace-
ment. The lounge is narrow, and an upper berth means gymnas-
tics not becoming, not to say perspiration-provoking in one of
ease-seeking bigness, but he insists on drawing cards for first,,
second, and third choices.

The major card falls to me. I take the upper berth on the
ground of having always loved the high places. William taking
the lower, Arthur makes the best of things, and displays a
notable dexterity in stowage on the lounge.

Sleeping car nights are much alike. There is always the

10 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

same uneasy feeling that you are going in the wrong direction,
the same sleepy mental effort at correction of a known-to-be
wrong impression — a pleasant wandering off into a speculative
by-path — how such things come to be — Locke on the Under-
standing— rather dull old geezer to read — depends on one's state
of mind — consciousness of darkness — velvety — well, this is com-
fortable and soothing at any rate, even if one doesn't sleep —
wonder what the time is — don't want to disturb the others by snap-
ping on a light — O, well, Wroe's in the bunk below me, he can't
get it — the edge of the bunk will keep it off Art's face on the
lounge — snap — watch — snap) — dark — 12.30 — wonder where we set
back our watches — course — distance traveled west sets Chicago
time a bit ahead — circumference of earth is 25,000 miles — revolves
once in 24 hours — rather over 1 ,000 miles an hour — 20 minutes
is one- third of an hour — one- third of 1 ,000 is 333 J — aug-g-h — o-ow
— oblivion.

A gray morning, and nearing Council Bluffs, Iowa. On the
rear platform I take my hat off to feel the sweet fall rain that
refreshes the land. Roll on roll of prairie, belted and banded
with cottonwoods, heaves away to a luminous horizon under a
free and cloudy sky. The Typhon locks of the rain clouds hang
low in the east. With thankfulness to see the open country, I
fairly laugh aloud with sheer joy of it, it looks so familiar and
kindly, and is wrapped in such a heavenly quietness, the rattle
of the train being merely sub-conscious.

There is a dignified fellow Englishman on the platform, his
gray tweeds, drooping gray mustache and eyebrows in perfect
accord with his clothing, and with a regulation fresh complexion
on a spare and military figure. We are politely unconscious of
each other's presence. Unfortunate — very — umpire not there to
introduce us, but must observe the rules of the game, you know.

Wroe joins me and takes a deep breath, and looks as one
meeting an old friend as he views the open face of the earth.
He comments on the grade of the corn crops we pass — a critical
and farmer-like appraisal — distinguishes popcorn for me from
other types. We pass a small settlement — he waves his arm to a
little boy in overalls in a dooryard.

"He just had to get up to see the Overland Limited go by.
She's never stopped there since she began to run. Goes by once

The First Day II

every day. Some day she will stop right there. He will be there
to see it. It will be a great day. At one bound, from a mere
pin point on the map, that little fellow's domicile will leap to an
honored place among the great metropoli of the world. The
Overland Limited stopped there. And he is no longer an obscure
country dweller in momma-patched overalls — he is a cosmopolite —
a citizen of the world — a man who has seen things, b'gosh." The
jesting kindliness of Wroe's voice as he makes this little comment
is pleasant to hear.

We got breakfast west of Omaha. The cottonwoods are the
glory of Nebraska — the banks and kindly protecting belts of
them — their marching files along the distant water courses — their
methodical ascent of the rises — over the hills and far away. There
is a level gray ceiling of cloud, with a hint of broken ochreous white
and pale violet near the horizon, which seems to promise a clearing
of the weather before long.

The corn is almost universally ready for shocking, but a couple
of quarter sections are passed yet green, evidently planted late.
We see crows over the corn shocks, darkly flapping, with wing
feathers momentarily separated against the sky, and over a little
creek — the Wroe bookplate. The cottonwoods are becoming
fewer, and the countryside bare. It is now more like the far
northwest, and suggests a chilly bleakness in late fall and winter.
Near a watertank an old fashioned surrey, quite a relic of mediae-
valism in these automobile-owning days, is passed, and a few
minutes later is seen the first automobile since leaving Chicago.

The North Platte River shows stray channels bound with
gravel bars; silt bars and flats; islets bound within the flats, and
bordered all about with cottonwoods and dog-willows; a flash
of bulrushes here and there; a random patterning of russets,
dutch pinks, sunny yellows, pale violets, broken purple pinks
upon an undertone of gray green. Presently we leave the Platte,
and the cottonwoods vanish into the shelter of distant coulees.

A few flocks of sheep are seen. What corn is observed seems
to be full-eared and fairly ripened, but it is noticeably stunted
as compared with that on the lower levels east of the Platte. The
only birds visible are hawks, of which the sparrow hawk, hen
harrier, and sharp-shinned hawk are identified, besides one kingly
fellow on a fence stake — a peregrine falcon, who, as he rises.

12 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

delights the artist with the splendid sword-like sweep of his wings.

Some time before reaching Sherman, Wyo., 8,010 feet above
sea level, the land takes an aspect of bleak, bare desolation, broken
only by an occasional sheep herder's hut, or a straggling fence.
A feeding station for stock is quite an event. Arthur comments on
the isolation of things, and the hardihood of early homesteaders.
This serves as the introduction to a surveyor's story told by the
artist. A survey party in this part of the West years ago came
upon a deserted homestead. The doors and windows of the
house were boarded up. On the boards on one side was chalked
*'Four miles from wood." On the second side was chalked "Six
miles from water." On the third side, "A hundred miles from a
railroad," and on the last side, "God bless our home."

The clouds hang low, and it gets a bit monotonous. A resort
is had to cards, this time Ellicott and Jimmy against Pratt and
Wroe at pedro, in which the first two are victorious by a narrow
margin. Bill and Art then go to a game of their own, in which,
hands of twelve each being dealt, the players draw and discard
in runs, threes and fours, a deuce having any value the man drawing
it likes to give it in combination with the others. The man playing
out all his cards first is credited with the number of pips counted
on the cards still remaining in the hand of his opponent. As he
plays, Bill keeps up a running comment that tickles the other two
mightily. I don't hear all of it, but get a stray sentence now and
then.

"Come across, now. Art — can't wait here all day for you.
You're off the reserve. Now, will you come quietly, or do I
have to tie you ? Now, now (taking up a card from Art's discard,
and completing a trio with it), you shouldn't do things like that —
they're very unwise."

"Nothing else to do," growls Art, and grins at the same time.
In fact, a continually wavering and cigar-punctuated smile is his
chorus to Bill's obiter dicta.

The steward of the dining car comes to Wroe, and there is a
whispered conference. Art catches a word. His eyes open antic-
ipatorily, the dawning expression of pleased expectation of
gustatorial delights on his genial countenance, succeeded im-
mediately by a look of doubt. I catch four words from his
questioning remark to Bill: "Game warden — state law." The

The First Day 13

steward smiles discreetly, but says nothing. Bill grins, turns to
me, and asks suddenly, "How do you want your prairie chicken —
broiled or roasted?"

"Broiled." And as the steward departs smiling, I conjecture
to myself by what magic have Bill and the steward conjured
from out this lonely waste for our epicurean delectation the erst-
loved bird 1 had not heard of in years, and which I had supposed
was extinct as the passenger pigeon. I understand now the
suggestion made at noon that we eat light at luncheon, which we
did — Arthur with a discriminating care which I now know not
to have been with any regard to Bill's suggestion at the beginning
of the journey, as to the advantages of dieting on Mrs. Pratt's
account.

At dinner the talk is of old, and almost forgotten card games ;
straight whist — which vanished about the time bicycles began to
fade away from the streets — cribbage, nap, and that famous old
lower-Mississippi before-the-war game, brag, from which the
modern poker was developed. Arthur has never seen cribbage. I
undertake to teach him after dinner. Ellicott shows Art what to
discard and what to play, while William is deep in war news on
a near-by seat. Art is much tickled by the quaint nomenclature
of the game — one for his nob and two for his heels — but appears to
consider the system of reckoning points, especially when his
vis-a-vis tabs up a score of sixteen on a hand of absurdly low cards,
as a special development of higher accounting.

Speaking of early American settlement with Ellicott, whose
forbears first planted themselves in New England some time in
1665, I remarked that some of those early arrivals brought some
interesting coats of arms with them.

"Most of 'em didn't need anything else," he responds.

This gives one a new slant on the matter of distinguishing
devices. Among the various essayists I have read, I do not
recall one who has made any comment on the moral influence
toward accomplishment in the face of hardship and privation,
that may be contained in the heraldically-shorthanded record of
forbears honored.

Bill and Art commence again to draw and discard, with the
other two in cheerful contemplation. It is one of the easiest
things we do. Ellicott is one of the best contemplaters I know.

14 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rocl^ies

He can contemplate with one for hours in a sociable silence that
is satisfying.

Sandwiches from the remainder of the prairie chicken come.
We draw a hand of poker to see who gets again the choice of
berths. This time Art gets the upper berth. It's wide — if he
does have to lift himself to it. I find the lounge quite comfortable.

IN THE MOUNTAINS

Near Evamton, W^o. Monday the fourteenth.

Since daylight, from the observation platform, I have watched
the low hills in the rear of the train, itself running several thousand
feet above sea level, in changing vistas shouldering their way
against the sky in long procession. They sweep and soar in
luminous gray bulk against a goldenly-glowing cloudy sky in the
east ; that to south and north in low down rifts breaks into
the loveliest pearl greens, and overhead into a wet blue that has
the merest ghost of south Atlantic sea water elusively hovering
in its placid depths. And from their shimmering gray distances
in the sunlit east the hills come sliding down into the valley in
long, sweeping curves to take their local color as they come into
full light, of faded old gold. On this field, the aspens, turned by
the frost, flame in orange vermilion, blazing the brighter for the
gray undertone of their bare stems. Now we leave the ranges,
covered with morning frost that departs before the sun, and come
into a level valley, bound about with yet other hills. The color
of these, full of light, is not so much gray as a prismatic, light-
quivering field of minute, separately unseen points of color — red,
violet, pale green, full green, dull yellow, bright yellow, olive,
blue of a dozen different tones of blueness, purplishness, or green-
ness, all under the morning light, broken, reflected, and refracted
in multitudinous ways, brought and harmonized together into
a gray that is the sum of all color — alike a painter's delight and a
painter's despair.

And their scale. This is not realized until, holding a pencil
at arm's length — one eye closed, the length of one side of a quarter
section of irrigated corn half a mile away, looking about as big as
a pocket handkerchief, is taken off with a sliding finger, and then
four times increased on the length of the pencil, giving a propor-
tionate mile, the length so shown is again at arm's length sighted
against the rising side of a hill just beyond the corn patch. It
covers something less than the twentieth part of the length of the
incline from base to peak, beyond which most likely rises another
yet nobler in height and contour.

Page 15

16 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

They sweep and. soar and tower. One can only contemplate
in silence, and thankfulness that it has been given one to see these
things, the while there hangs in memory — haply to an old Gregor-
ian chant remembered from school days' morning chapel — a
sentence from the Venite: "In his hand are the four corners of
the earth, and the strength of the hills is his also."

"The strength of the hills" — that's the word.

The dining car is deserted, except for the waiters and the
steward at his typewriter, preparing his bills for the day. Over
an early cup of tea, the steward is good enough to talk to me.
He is a spare, dark man, carrying responsibility with polite ease,
and with a manner of speaking that makes one feel he has a work-
man's pride in his job. A comment on the finished perfection of
the service his men give, and the utter invisibility of his machinery
brings the acknowledgment: "There is a good bit of it. "

He fishes out a requisition sheet for food, wines, and cigars
only, and passes it to me with a smile. I count the items in half
a column, and mentally add seven close set columns of small type.

"Five hundred and twenty-five items," I sum.

"Exclusive of crockery, napery, silver, and housekeeping
supplies," he nods. "To provide for an estimated — no — worked-
out average of between forty and fifty guests one meal each be-
tween Chicago and Ogden at this time of year."

"That, of course, means bookkeeping?"

"Yes, but mine lies within defined limits. The really fine
figuring is done at the head office on the separate reports from
each car taken all together."

Our further talk covered the heads of the difference between
scientific, non-wasting provision for variable travel, and provision
for large bodies of men moving all together, provision for railway
construction camps and section hands, cooking, and provisioning
in old-time lumber camps on the coast; his trip through the
Canadian Rockies and Selkirks to Vancouver and back in charge
of commissariat for Mr. Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. ; his firm
conviction that travelers should see America first, and the proba-
bility that they would next season, as a result of the war. His
own home place was Omaha, and he had a wife, and two children
going to school.

One took note of the fact that the conductors and trainmen

In the Mountains 17

were men past middle life, gray headed, gray mustached, when
they were not clean shaven, with an awake and responsible bearing
that put them in a class by themselves. One such, a conductor
with a prelatically cleancut face and a bearing that would have
graced an archbishop, who has been on the road traveling that
run for thirty-five years, admitted me to a pleasant conversa-
tional fellowship between stations.

The hills are sliding by, sliding by. Down, down, down we go
from the summit. Every section crew we pass waves a friendly
greeting. The sky is clear, the air is crisp — a wine-like air in
truth. From the meadows rise the buffalo birds in flocks, alter-
nated with scattered Colorado magpies, and once, a flock of crows.

"OGDEN, Next stop."

"Check your baggage, Jimmy. We change for Salt Lake
City here."

The baggage is transferred and we wait for our train to be made
up. In the interval I reflect again on the splendid sustained chords
of the descent down the long grades, timed by the tympani of the
rail joints, and irregularly crescendoing into the diapasoned roar —
the full orchestra — a score of octaves deep, of some culvert whose
piers and girders all together chant our passing.

Leaving Ogden, the meadows open wider. The Lombardy
poplars, that for an hour past have been seen scattered singly and
in twos and threes, now form into files, double column of twos,
and battalions.

"That 's the Mormons, Jimmy," William informs me. "They
planted those poplars all over the shop. Wherever in this part
of the West you see the Lombardy poplar, that's a Mormon
colony."

Farmstead succeeds farmstead, always and ever with trees
planted round about. In the river bottoms, below the floor of
the valley, the cottonwoods lean to the wind.

"Jimmy, that's the Great Salt Lake, and the Wasatch Range."
And as 1 look, adding the seen splendor of the great chain that
bluely floats above the quiet waters to the little I recollect of that
dramatic chapter of the West's history, I pick up a sentence here
and there of the summary of Mormon history — the past and
present status of the faith, moral and politico-social reasons for
the institution of polygamy, that William is delivering to two

18 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

other deeply interested listeners, in the intervals of borrowing
matches from me.

What a valley! What a man! What a people; trained in
habits of industry, sobriety, thrift, and union to a specific code
of religious and social obligation, he brought together. Who?
Brigham Young. One point of William's summary is an attention-
compelling reason for the tenet that has occasioned the bitterest
attacks upon the Mormon church. "The institution of plural
wives, a social necessity to provide population for the land, was
in the beginning initiated by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
as a reward for conspicuous morality, thrift, industry, and social
responsibility. Consequently, for the most part, the duty fell
only to those financially capable of properly caring for more than
one wife, and who had been proved socially and morally worthy.
And heredity holding good, those qualities have been handed down
to a succeeding generation of a greater number than would other-
wise have been possible."

It seems an explanation worth considering, and by this time
arrived at Salt Lake City, the bunch, passing up town by auto-
mobile, seem agreed on the proposition that Brigham Young is
entitled to rank among the great civilizers of the western hemi-
sphere, qualified by William's statement that Smith and he were
themselves succeeded by very able men.

Salt Lake City gives one an impression of wide, clean, well-
kept streets, the majesty of the hills crowning their perspective.
Great trees rank the sidewalks. There is a warm sun in a cloudless
sky. We pass the temple. It is of bastard Gothic — an archi-
tecturally shameless building, unspeakably bad, but echoing the
spirit of its time and people. In the square adjoining is a bronze
monument to the first settlers of the valley and founders of the
city. Mormon farmers are identified among the healthy looking,
smoothly moving crowds on the streets. There is a salt
tang in the air. One sees the farmer face again. What's it
like? I've got it: Boer. After all, why not? A corresponding
environment and occupation, a hard and fast creed, patriarchal
authority over his women-kind — certainly the same type of face
may come.

At a hat store. Art and Bill try a cowboy hat upon me. It
sits most comfortably, and the broad brim is a comfort to the eyes.

In the Mountains 19

"Say," commends Art, "he looks all right in that. May I make
you a present of it, Jimmy?"

"Hold on, I'm in this. We're going to get him a band for
it." And William with discriminating care selects, and deftly
adjusts an embossed leather band. "Now, Jimmy, the crown of
this hat has to be punched just so." William with two fingers
pokes the crown of the hat in two places, producing four dents
equidistant of the two cranial meridians, and adding the indefinable
touch that is of the West western. "And it must sit so." He
illustrates, and so doing, makes clear that on the range equally
with Bond Street or Pall Mall there is also binding the unwritten
law of style to govern the properly clothed man.

They leave me at lunch, with a last injunction to be sure and
see the Tabernacle before they rejoin me at the Hotel Utah,
visibly anxious that I shall not fail in that duty to Salt Lake City
and the faith, apparently by a lex non scripta binding upon every
new visitor to the Mormon metropolis.

At dinner at the Hotel Utah we were waited upon by a head
waiter of as nearly as could be determined, half Chinese, half
negro blood, of a surpassingly grotesque ugliness, reminding one
of some Japanese war mask, beautiful in its very diabolism of
feature, with the speech of a professor of English and the manners
of an ambassador. In the midst of dinner, a singer bursting forth
with an astonishing volume of sound, the prior efforts of the
orchestra having been of no special excellence, the difference
between their aspect in evening dress and their performance, led
Bill to remark upon their likeness to the doorman upstairs in a
wine-colored livery, with a silk hat on his head, and a chew of
tobacco in his face.

Presently after dinner, again to the depot, and once more upon
our way to the promised land, our final destination being Yellow-
stone, the tourist terminal at the entrance to Yellowstone National
Park. In the most matter-of-fact way, the train once under way.
Art and Bill settled to their card game begun the first night
out from Chicago, and which seems to comfortably take the place
of all things else to them. They have already tabbed up an
unwieldy score of points on either side, and might have shortly
sore need of an adding machine, but for the simple device of
subtracting one score from the other, leaving one man plus a

20 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

few points and the other flat for a fresh start. Sleepily noticing
a slight up grade, a cloudy night without, and a chilly wind
that seemed to promise rain, the artist went to bed and left them
at it.

THE FIRST CAMP

Tuesday the fifteenth.

At daylight this morning, through a driving sleet storm from
the west, a low-lying stream, whose deep channel paralleled the
railway tracks, was made out through drifting mist. Its banks on
the farther side rose into raggedly timbered heights that lost
themselves in low hanging clouds. This was the headwater of
the south fork of the Madison river. It was a good, steady,
persistent sort of storm; there was no question about that. But
the travel of a train has a noticeably mitigating effect on even
the most determined looking foul weather. There is such a thing
as removing beyond the sphere of influence. By the time Yel-
lowstone was reached, there was a sensible moderation, though
back up the tracks it could be seen raging over the hill tops in
as pretty a mess of flying wrack as ever descriptive writer laid
himself out to picture.

In occasional flurries of sleet, and a lightening of the southern
sky, a half promise of a break in the weather which might or might
not be realized, we debarked. Breakfast was had at the depot.
At the tables in the dining room were gathered the obvious after-
guard of the summer's sightseers, a scattered and reminiscent
remnant of the seasonal army that passes in and out of the national
park. After breakfast, waiting for conveyances, a pair of pointers
caught the artist's eye. Desiring their further acquaintance, he
unthinkingly whistled to them, but was in kindness checked
by William.

"Jimmy, that 's a bad break. You mustn't ever do that again.
To call another man's dog, unless you 're in charge of him, is one
of the seven deadly sins of the sportsman's code."

From Yellowstone by concord and wagon the further way lay
through sagebrush levels of lodgepole pine, skirting and crossing
the main stream of the Madison to our camping ground, in a bend
of the Madison river, at an altitude of 6,500 feet, in heavily
timbered country, eight miles from Yellowstone and five from
Grayling postoffice, Montana. In the continuing storm we found
tents pitched and all things made ready. We were welcomed to

Page 21

22

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

camp by Fred Reichenbach (Swiss, from
Berne, six years in this country) and Jay
Whitman, from Davis County, Missouri
— as he himself acknowledges, one of the
gentlemen who have to be shown — and
otherwise a self-possessed quiet man with
a happy smile and a sandy mustache.
On the way out to camp, the only
life observed was a gray squirrel, who, regardless of the weather,
seemed bent on making a busy best of things.

There is in the camp a well bred, finely mannered liver and
white pointer dog. Jay by name, son of a famous prizewinner once
owned by Bill. With him are two black-and-tan fox hounds.
Trailer and Chambeau, far larger than their English brethren,
weighing eighty pounds each, owned by Fred. These are classed
by Bill as the finest of their kind within his memory. All three
dogs are sociable, but Jay has a gentle self-effacingness, though
of unquestioned spirit and courage, that makes him a very enjoy-
able companion. The hounds are obedient to a word, but at the
same time dignified and self respecting. They do not
fraternize with the pointer, but their politeness to him
and his gentlemanly acceptance of the situation
is an object lesson in deportment. Respecting
each other's different breeding as they do,
they are very good friends.
Sleet and wind contin-
ued throughout the after-
noon, but there was little
heed for weather in the
immediate business of un-
packing camp impedimenta,
unrolling blankets, sorting
out clothes, and making
beds. Our camp accommo-
dation consisted of a sleep-
ing tent, messtent, cook tent
and guide's tent.

As we began to prepare
Trailer and Chambeau our respective couches in the

The First Camp 23

sleeping tent, Arthur tendered his camp fellows each a particu-
larly wide and heavy dark green blanket, at least half an inch
thick, of a weight and length of nap quite outside common
experience.

"They'll make good outside wraps for your blankets," he
assured us.

"Never saw any like 'em before," commented the artist.
"What are they — lap robes?"

"Been using them for that."

The artist looked interrogative. Art expounded further;
"They're papermaker's felts, Jimmy. About the most important
part of a papermaking machine is the felt. That's an endless
belt of great width and length, made of the very finest wool — ab-
solutely pure. It's probably the most expensive thing of its
kind on the market. It goes up to a dollar a pound in thousand
pound lots. This blanket passes over the rollers, and receives
the newly formed damp sheet of paper. It's made without laps.
It's an expensive and particular part of the machinery, and is
handled with a good deal of care. If it gets the least bit damaged
it has to be taken off. It can't be patched, for the patches would
show on the paper. This was a brand new blanket, put on the
machine for the first time. An accident happened, and it was torn.
That killed it for the paper business, so I had it taken off and
dyed green, and made up into lap robes."

Art displayed also, and later wore with a great deal of hardi-
hood against cold weather, a blanket suit, handsomely tailored
from another section of the same damaged felt. The blankets so
provided were quite the warmest, most cold repelling, and alto-
gether the finest under and top casing for a camp bed either
member of the party had ever slept in.

In the late afternoon coots and redheads to the number
of thirty-eight or forty dropped down on the river within two hun-
dred yards of camp. Odd flights of ducks were observed west of
camp just upon sundown.

At sundown, estimated time 6:20, the storm broke, the sky
cleared in the west, and a clear night succeeded. As we sat at
supper, the stars blazed in the void of night, and the evening star,
hanging low in the west like a dwarfed moon, winked a promise
of clear days to come. A hoarse-voiced old mallard drake calls

24 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

for his mates on the river not far from camp. Floating up out
of the darkness beyond the ruddy circle of the fire before the
messtent, it is a sound eloquent of the open and the mystery of
the wild night.

After supper again came the continuing card game by the
two seniors in camp life, on the end of the messtent table, to the
accompaniment of much tobacco, and under the interested super-
intendence of Fred and Jay, the while the artist busily scribbled
down impressions and in turn contemplated the campfire, and the
wavering into sight and out again of the surrounding pines beneath
which the horses quietly munched their feed, in the alternate
leaping and falling of the flames.

We slept, inducted into our slumbers by the grateful warmth
of a small square sheet-iron camp stove in one corner of the sleep-
ing tent, tended for some time beforehand by the genial Whit-
man, to dissipate the storm-bred damp.

THINGS ABOUT CAMP

Wednesday the sixteenth.

"The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
And it is well-nigh day.
And Harry our King is gone hunting
To bring his deer to bay.

To bring his deer to bay.

"The eeist is bright with morning light.
And darkness it is fled;
And the lusty horn calls up the morn
From off his lazy bed.

From off his lazy bed."

Thus the artist, at the top of his voice, for the grateful
titillation of his own satisfied ears and the awakening of his fel-
lows, the morning after arrival in camp.

William rolled lazily over and grinned amiably.

" Where 'd you learn that, Jimmy?" queried Art.

** It's an old hunting song of the eighth Harry's time we used
to sing in chorus when I was a kid at school."

"Fine," commended William. "Now, you learn this," and

Things About Camp 25

William proceeded to pour out upon the morning air the melodic
history of an elderly gentleman who appeared to be sadly up
against it, and who, in spite of his utmost efforts could accomplish
nothing to his satisfaction.

"The old gentleman seems to have been in hard luck," com-
mented the artist. "Is that the regular matin song in camp?"

"It is in some, and a good many more places not camps."

These cryptics are here set down for the benefit of those who
may be wise to the things hidden from the non-initiate. A morn-
ing toilet in camp is distinctly an impromptu affair. One of the
two Jays, both being interested spectators, inquired of the artist:

"The English always wash in cold water, don't they?"

"It's a national institution," he was gravely assured. "Of
course, it kills a good many of them, but those that survive grow
up with remarkably hardy constitutions. Among some it is
reckoned more dangerous to drink it."

The first breakfast in camp had something of the feeling of a
religious observance, which added to the savor of fried ham, pota-
toes, soda biscuit, jam, and coffee, all, of course, preceded by the
introductory oatmeal.

Camp housekeeping is a simple matter. The flat dweller
does not realize how many things can be eliminated with no special
inconvenience until he comes where they are not to be had. The
messtent, its entrance facing the north, has for a table a few
planks, or more likely a few saplings, trimmed smooth on the
upper side with the axe, laid side by side upon cross pieces sup-
ported on posts driven into the ground to table height. Upon
these again is a length of oil cloth smoothly laid, on the farther
end of which are stacked the various bottles and cans containing
comestible comforts that fill up the chinks between the staples
of a meal. A couple of halved logs, supported on posts driven
in the ground either side of the table, furnish sufficiently com-
modious seats. With trunks, beds, rod and gun cases, and mis-
cellaneous impedimenta, or as would be said in the Coast
Chinook, "ictas," at the sides, it quickly acquires a populated and
homelike appearance.

At its left side is the sleeping tent, its sides held and bound
with logs, and within, the piled hay that makes the foundation
of the nightly couch held within bounds by another log laid on

26 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

the ground from side to side. On one side near the door, on a
low platform of sand held within short logs, stands a small square
sheet-iron stove, its flue passing through the tent roof, the canvas
protected with a square of sheet iron. Taking small billets of
wood cut with the axe, not more than six or eight inches long,
such a stove, for all its small size is capable of bringing up the
interior to a comfortable pitch in even the bitterest weather.
Its good effect may be further conserved by banking snow round
the sides of the tent. To the right is the guides' tent, its back to
the square of which it forms the third side with the other two, and
its entrance facing that of the cook tent, as much as it is presumed
for the benefit of warmth from the cook tent as for the convenience
of passing from one to the other, they being separated by a narrow
alley. The interior of the guides' tent is much as that of the
sleeping tent. In the cook tent a kitchen table is supplied by a
few saplings laid side by side on posts. The stove, rather larger
than the one already described, and with an oven, is likewise
upon a log-confined platform of sand. Canned goods are stacked
on the end of the table, meats hang from the ridgepole overhead,
besides other comestible items. Such cooking utensils as are
needed are hung near the stove. Of these the chief, of course, is
the frying pan, which in the hands of an expert camp cook can be
put to a far greater variety of uses than are commonly dreamed of
by even the most resourceful housewife. Heavy bags of provis-
ions, potatoes, beans, flour, and the like, stand under the table.
The water bucket, its contents changed often from the nearby
river or spring, with its dipper or drinking cup, stands near the
door. Stovewood, cut to length and split, is neatly stacked near
the stove. With all its extemporaneity of arrangement there is
yet about the cook tent, especially if the man in charge be a real
camp cook, an aspect of competent resourcefulness comforting
to a hungry soul.

In the center of the space defined by the three first mentioned
tents is the campfire, distributing its hallowed warmth and light
upon all quarters alike. Beyond the open side of the square, in
the shelter of young firs, is the wagon, about which the horses,
when they are not hobbled and turned loose to graze at will,
gather in equine sociability. To one side of these is the woodpile,
an assemblage of freshly fallen young firs and pines. A sawbuck

Things About Camp 27

is extemporized by driving into the ground four posts X wise,
and against the log lying in the sacrificial cradle thus formed lie
the cross-cut saw and an axe — the two most important tools in
making any kind of a camp.

About the first thing the novice in camp life has knocked
into him with kindly severity, is the importance of orderliness.
There being no such conveniences as shelves, drawers, or casual
tables, and available nails or hooks being few, a constant practice
must be made, until it becomes an automatic habit, of restoring
everything that is taken up and used to the precise spot from which
it is taken. The soap is always to be found at the same point
on the ground beside the washbowl or at the margin of the stream,
and the camp towel near by. Some campers, of course, are fussy
enough to provide their own individual towels and soap tablets —
in which case they may, of course, do what they please with them.
The axe must be replaced always in the same place, and so with
all other "ictas," each to its appointed locus.

The next thing is that for the very reason that there is no
floor to be swept and mopped, in the messtent or elsewhere, the
habit of personal neatness is for common health's sake of com-
manding importance. Scraps of paper, food skins and so forth,
must not be dropped at random, but must be orderly disposed of,
preferably by fire. This was pointedly brought home to the artist
the first evening in camp, when Art, dropping a piece of sausage
skin on the messtent floor, remembered himself, and, picking it
up, admonished Jimmy on the need above set forth. His little
health lecture was further confirmed by William with the state-
ment that even where the utmost care had been taken, any hunt-
ing camp should be broken after two weeks for health's sake.

It is a matter of course to care for a gun or a fishing rod.
Quite as important is the care of the axe. Of all tools in camp
it most needs to be handled with respect, its edge nursed, its blade
kept bright, and strictly reserved in use for its own proper purpose.
The waste of energy and time occasioned by an axe with a nicked
and dull edge caused by misuse will make the difference between
comfort and perilous discomfort. It may even make the differ-
ence between life and death.

A little to the rear of the messtent, its margin thickly set
with lodgepole pines and aspen, whose trunks amid willow brush

28

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

'^R»i^e/-At

Ow the Madison river

rise out of still water backed up by construction works some
distance down stream, lies the river. Twenty paces or so from
the angle of the camp is an opening, slightly swampy, where
drawn up upon the bank lies a boat a few degrees more open
to the unstable element than a leaky sieve, destined to carry us
upon projected ducking and fishing expeditions. Frogs scramble
into the water as one comes near the margin.

To the west the sagebrush-covered flat, pointed with a few
scattering pines, on which the camp is situated, is bounded by a
dense bank of firs interspersed with aspens. Through their tops
is visible at intervals the crests of a distant range of mountains
covered with fresh fallen snow — the main Madison range — half
hidden by drifting cloud through which a doubtful sun struggles
mistily. East rises a sagebrush bank that, with a few firs, well
shelters the camp. Above this, another flat extends a mile or so
east and north, bounded with fir forest. A few hardy adventurers
from the main body are scattered irregularly over the flat.

Following the high bank above the river, there is a curious
suggestion of hidden life borne in upon one. One expects any
moment to see some dweller of the wild — a bear maybe, or some
great elk — disclose himself at the edge of the timber. Expectant
eyes are disappointed until, arriving at the edge of the high

Things About Camp

29

bank above the river there is seen on the flats below a blue heron.
Alertly still, aloof, one has but time to recall Whittier's lines:

"Lo, there the hermit of the waters,
The ghost of ages dim.
The fisher of the solitudes
Stands by the river's brim."

A foot crunches upon loose stones, a twig creaks, and he rises and
saunters away through the air with an easy, unhurried flight
that causes a speculation whether, feathered
aristocrat that he is, he be not well ac-
quainted with Lord Chesterfield's maxim
that though a gentleman may be in haste, he
is never in a hurry.

The willows and aspens that clothe the
steep bank below are ablaze with the tinting
of the early frosts. The river flows placidly
by, and far across its breadth, broken with
innumerable willow-forested islets, is a broad
expanse of willow swamp, gloriously golden
and orange in the growing light, and the
brighter in color for the opposition of the firs
that line the distant bank, whose dark blue green, grayed by
distance, cuts sharp against the far hills, through a great gap
— the Madison canyon — in which, far upstream the river comes
forth. Downstream the river widens into a bend, whose farther
round is lined with just such
another field of willows un-
der firs. Through a valley
to which the hills here
descend is visible a yet
farther range, whose peaks
lume sunnily white with new
snow.

To the west, above the
tops of the firs below in whose
shelter lies the camp, is
visible range on range of

mountains, fairly overpower- ' '^'".\tiih'.'^'>*^'^*7i'^

ing in their scale and "Here I halt and paint"

A feathered aristocrat

30 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

majesty, the fresh snow upon their great shoulders and in their
hollows bright in sun from a rift in the clouds that make the
overhead gray.

Here I halt and paint, with a keen delight in the peaceful
isolation of it all, whose memory will carry one over many weary
city days to come.

The temperature rises, and by noon the sleet and snow are
gone from the camp, and have left the sagebrush on the flats above.
Odd pairs of ducks were observed on the river, and near to camp
California robins, cedar waxwings, camp robbers (a variety of jay)
and finches. The robins are especially tame and unconcerned.
They are broader of beam than the eastern bird, rather larger and
more heavily built; have a gray spot on each shoulder, black
heads, and haunt the water's edge. There are continual excur-
sions, alarums, ambuscades, and free skirmishes between them
and the camp robbers. Elk signs were reported a short distance
northwest of camp, and an eagle in the same direction in the
middle of the afternoon. Gray and red squirrels are very active.
Trout are rising quite freely on the river.

In spite of heavy clouds and threatening rain in the afternoon,
an Evinrude motor, brought by Bill from Chicago in a small
trunk, was fitted to the leaky boat. Guns, decoys, rods, and
fishing tackle were overhauled. Rods were set up and experi-
mentally whipped in the hand, as a test of joints, spring, and
response. Reels, taken from a box that was handled sacredly,
as a reliquary, with comparison of their mechanism and merits,
were apportioned, each to its rod. There was an inspection of
fly books and leader boxes. Gun barrels were squinted through,
and though speckless, for the hundredth time the lubricative rag
was passed through. Breech blocks and actions were tried, oiled,
and wiped. Ammunition boxes were opened, and, critical appraise-
ment being made of their contents, were stacked upon the messtent
table, where, between a couple of militantly red Dutch cheeses,
flanked by the other tinned and jarred comestibles, they suggested
a doubly bellical preparation. These several things were done
with a leisurely care, a lingering particularity that distinguished
the afternoons' employment as being the ritualistic crown and
cap of many such adjustments and inspections o' dull evenings
in long city-bound months preceding the supreme event.

Things About Camp

31

This done, William, with
Whitman, decided to have a
try for duck, scattered pairs
of which had been seen in
flight over the river all after-
noon, while the voices of still
others were heard from the
hidden channels between the
willow islands far out. They
returned some time after
five o'clock with four fine
full-grown young red-heads,
taken with a sixteen-gauge
gun in a fly-a-way down-
stream. Taken over by
Fred for culinary exploita-
tion, the fire logged up for

Jay Whitman

the evening, the expectatory interval produced from Jay some
conversational particulars regarding himself.

He came to Montana in 1881, thirty-three years ago, just
about the time of the last great movement of the now extinct
buffalo herds. He has never been back to Missouri to see his
folks since. He started back once, and got as far as Omaha, and
the prairie country of the East weighed upon his spirits with such
monotony — "looked so damn lonesome" — to use his own words,
"that I turned right around in my tracks, and came back to the
mountains. No, sir, I never tried it again." He ranches 320
acres fifty miles from St. Anthony, Idaho with a wife and four
children. His main product is timothy and wild hay, which at the
present time is worth around $14.50 a ton. It has been as high as
$16.00. In the memory of the writer it has been put up and sold
in the Canadian Northwest for $8.00 and $12.00 a ton.

The artist, offering some question as to the habits of the
grizzly bear, is referred to Fred, busy in the cook tent, whence
an odor of duck in preparation enticingly circumambiates the
evening air. Asking Fred if he is familiar with the habits of the
animal in question, Fred responds in a matter of fact way, " I have
catched quite a few," and unhurriedly adjusts ham slices in the
frying pan.
3

32

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

"Fred"

"How many?"
"Maybe five or six,"
and he turns a slice of ham,
shifts it to one side, and lays
another beside it. "One
pretty nearly gets me once."
And as he cuts bread, juggles
ham, duck, and fried pota-
toes on to their respective
plates, and makes coffee,
with unhurried calm, he
proceeds: "I sets a trap —
I catches them in traps, you
know — und I chains dot
trap to a green log. I
guess he was five hundert
pounds, maybe more as five
hundert pounds. Und 1 don't
see him for two or tree days, und then I thinks I better look
at dot trap. Und I goes mit my gun. Und dere was a bear all
right. He vas catched by der forepaw. Und he was mad — py
golly, he was mad. He was shoost raising hell in der woods. I
hears him a long way off. Und he haf dragged dot green log
half a mile from where I set der trap. Und when he sees me he
gets madder yet. I reckons I better shoot him. Und I don'd
make a good aim, und I only hits him in der leg. It hurts him
so he gets so much madder he tear his paw loose from der trap,
und he runs to reach me very fast. Py golly, you bet he comes
on business. Und he foam at der mouth, und his eyes is red.
Und I shoost happens to remember I ain't got only that one more
shot in my gun. So I don't afford to dake no chances. Und I
has to let him get pretty close so I don't miss. He vas a big bear."
"How close was he when you fired, Fred?"
"Oh, aboud six feets."

And Fred carries the grub into the messtent, and proceeds
to hand it round, with a cheerful care that the diners shall each
receive his due share of the fruit of his labors, that shows his pride
in his job.

Whitman reports that the storm of which the present

Things About Camp 33

threatening cloudiness is the hangover started last Friday eve-
ning, the 1 1 th, after the longest dry spell for this section — over five
weeks — in his memory. Fred, worried by an owl that he declared
was hooting at him, borrowed Bill's gun and bagged the bird, and
thereafter sat down to his own dinner with Jay with a mind
apparently much at ease.

A clear streak of pale orange in the east before, and some
light in the west after dinner, seem to promise a scattering of the
clouds. At 7 :30 p. m. the sky is clearing with clouds drifting from
the west. At the ground level what air does stir is from the east.
At 9 p. m. comes a fair breeze from the east, and the northern sky
is clear though overhead the clouds yet obscure the heavens.
This day closes with a blazing campfire, a promise of fair weather
on the morrow, and a great peace in the artist's soul.

TWO DAYS TOGETHER

Thursday the seventeenth.

Early astir, in a clear and frosty morning, after a cloudy
night, I went with all quietness to the edge of the water, and for
some time unobserved, was able to enjoy the spectacle of a con-
siderable flock of ducks close to shore. In the frosty mist, just
beginning to thin under the advancing sun, they dived, preened,
paddled, talked duck talk, played tag, and every little while some
one among them would sit up on his tail in the water and flap
his wings for sheer exuberance of good spirits. There is a cheerful
sociability about the duck that is very engaging. Some one in
the camp stirred noisily, an old drake squawked a note of warn-
ing, and with a rush of wings and a multitude of skittering wakes
as they rose, the entire flock took flight.

Immediately after breakfast. Bill, Art, and Jay went to
repairing the alleged boat, effecting also a more secure seating
for the motor at the stern. I went to painting on Papermaker's
Flat, above camp. To one fresh from the city, the isolation and
silence a few hundred yards from camp is to a degree impressive.
And yet it is peopled, for in the absence of all other distractions,
one notices subconsciously the slightest movement. The stirring

/- X

.r^

On Papermaker's Flat ""^Vjh v.,* iij^fcy

Page 34

Two Days Together 35

of a spray of sagebrush, be it by the wind or not, the quivering
of a tuft of grass, the stirring of a bird in a clump of aspens fifty
yards away, the passage of a pair of wild duck down the river just
outside the angle of direct vision, the hovering of an eagle high
overhead — a mere speck in the sky, a passing butterfly, the rising
of a stray trout to a fly two hundred yards away on the river, all
such small things bulk as large in consciousness as the passage of
a noisy motor van down a quiet residence street in the city, but
with a far pleasanter impression upon both mind and nerves.

As I painted, there was a harsh scream close behind and above
me. A great squirrel hawk swept over my head and settled
on the limb of a tree within ten yards or so. With a fine disregard
of my presence he made his morning toilet, spreading his tail and
each beautifully barred wing in turn. Little unseen things scur-
ried through the sagebrush. Wrens, black-caps, finches, and
yellow-hammers haunted the aspens and willows near at hand.
A Colorado magpie or two passed. Late butterflies prospected
through the sagebrush, seeking for flowers that had departed,
in their number comprising mourning cloaks (the Vanessa Antiopa),
the orange-tipped brimstone, small painted ladies, and black and
yellow swallow-tails. Wasps also were noted. On the river were
little clubs of ducks, each after his own kind. An eagle passed
overhead, sailing down the wind with still wings, and the effort-
lessness of his flight was enough to make one cease work and gaze
after the diminishing speck till, on a slight shift of vision, it was
lost altogether.

Back to camp for lunch, to find that the two papermakers
have been out during the morning on the river, and have brought
back four ten-inch Loch Leven trout, offspring of those planted,
by the government in the National Park twenty-two years since,
taken with a black-wing Trude fly. These they insist on the
artist's eating for lunch, since, as they aver, they had the fun of
catching them. I trust that my enjoyment of them gives them
the further pleasure they are entitled to. Jay, who waits on table,
regards me with a sympathizing smile, and as he passes the coffee
to me, says, "You certn'ly seem to like them trout, Jim."

Again in the afternoon Bill and Art went abroad, this time
for duck, while up on the flat the artist carried forward work
in the afternoon light projected in the morning. In the late

36 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

afternoon a species of brown-winged ephemerid was noted fly-
ing on the river, and trout rising to it freely.

The clouds that had scattered in the early morning began to
gather again toward evening, and a gray sunset followed. Above
the firs that belted the western edge of the flat, the heights of
the Madison range showed in cold blues, the snow on their crests
and in the hollows in a chilly white, as nearly without color as
snow ever is. Behind them rose a great bank of threatening gray
cloud, slightly purplish in tone. A little distance above the high-
est crest, the clouds broke, and with their edges brilliant with
pale yellow light, permitted a golden sun to be mistily seen. The
landscape below fell into subdued tones of gray, which came into
positive color, still toned with gray, only in the near foreground.

Coming toward camp, carrying the pastel sketch of the sunset
just made, with eyes still on the western heaven, the light changed
within sixty seconds. The erstwhile field of gray cloud broken
with pale yellow light where the sun broke through, became a
mass of striated somber crimson, dully flaring over half seen
deeper tones of violet gray. Over the subdued fire of this there
floated feathery flocks of cirrus clouds of flaming scarlet, so glow-
ingly brilliant as to cast a perceptible light upon the tops of the
distant pines, and on every light reflecting surface turned to the
west. Low down, behind the mountain tops, glowed a broad area
of red orange, against which the peaks were darkly defined. A
patch or two of clear sky, seen through openings in the clouds
glowed in luminous blue-green, with a depth of color and fullness
of light hard to suggest with either brush or pen.

"Well, Jimmy," saluted Art, as with Bill he came from the
boat, " I think you had the best afternoon of any of us. You got
what you went after, and we didn't get anything."

After dinner Fred produced a cribbage board which he had
manufactured during the afternoon from a stray piece of smooth
scantling that happened to be in camp, marking off the divisions
with a stub of lead pencil, and forming the holes with a four-inch
wire nail. It was a very satisfactory cribbage board, and set
upon the artist's drawing board, on a conveniently short length
of log on end, near the fire, furnished diversion for the guides
and the painter man. On the messtent table Art and Bill took
forward their own special contest a few hundred points further.

Two Days Together 37

A camp without tobacco is unthinkable. The equally effi-
cient substitute for thought has not yet been discovered or devised.
Nor is there any known means so effective for bridging the
conversational lacunae that often occur between even the most
sociably inclined of camp dwellers. Art's particular addiction
is to a cigarette before breakfast, which he rolls himself from a
pouch that contains tobacco and papers both. In the matter of
cigars also Art has a discriminating and matured judgment, while
the single corona to each that Bill passes out each evening is of
a soul-satisfying goodness. Bill does not smoke cigars when he
has a job that calls for active use of his hands. At these times he
favors a fatbellied briar — an excellent cadging pipe — with a drop
stem. The painter, though given to cigarettes, in the field prefers
a light straight bitted briar, as needing less attention than any
other mode of consuming the weed.

Early to bed is the rule, and so, somewhere around nine,
with an overcast sky and no frost in the air the day ends.

Friday the eighteenth.

At half after one this morning, being awake, through the tent
door I saw the stars. Brilliant, near, in this high clear sky they
lit the night as never in the smoke-shrouded city. It was frosty,
and the fire had died down in the stove. Awake for some time,
mentally debating whether to mend the fire or, being up, lay on
the desired extra coverings that were just out of reach, after va-
rious ineffectual attempts to conserve warmth by tucking in the
edges of the blankets more tightly, a decision was finally arrived at,
to do both. Presently, the fire mended, and with a handy overcoat
drawn up to my chin, and much more to my comfort, having dis-
turbed neither of my tentmates, I fell into a comfortable sleep
that lasted till well after daybreak.

After breakfast, in a clear and sunny morning, the motor
was shipped on the boat, and all three of us started upstream with
rods and tackle for two of us and a sketching outfit for the third.
The boat ran through a succession of sedgy meadows thicketed
with dog willows, from which a heron or two rose, and sailed lazily
away to a new stand. Looking downstream to the west, above
the tapestried gold and russet of the willow meadows, bounded

38

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

^^ / ^k-y^.'

Looking back from "a bit farther upstream"

by a line of dark firs, the mountains rose, tier on tier, into a sky
of liquid blue.

Landing on a bar below the great cut bank of obsidian sand
along whose top the trail from Yellowstone runs, the two fisher-
men, Art with the spoon and William with sundry flies, tried the
riffle at its tail, while the artist went to his own occupation. Art
had no success. William reported a big one fooling, but failed
to strike him. It was concluded to go a bit farther upstream.
Occasional pairs of mallard were seen on the passage of a mile or
so to a mid-stream bar with deep water on both sides, in a bend
below flat sedge meadows. Here William took two Loch Leven
trout in half an hour on a Reuben Wood, two and one-half and
one and one-quarter pounds, respectively. The heavier fish was
full of roe. No results were had with the spoon. On the road
back to camp a single butterball and a squirrel hawk were noticed.

A showery and thunderous afternoon in camp, such as was
this, is, or can be made full of small and comfortable employments.
Fred was busy in the cook tent, devising ways and means for the
greater efficiency of that department; William, a tackle box on
his knees, assorting leaders, flies and hooks; the artist at an easel,
working with swift decision, fastening down the impressions of

Two Days Together 39

the morning. Arthur contemplated their placid industry regret-
fully, sighed, shook his head over the perverse busyness of men
who apparently hadn't anything better to do, and with an inde-
pendence of spirit marking the man so far master of his soul as
not to be drawn by the magnetism of the multitude, calmly lay
down, and went to sleep.

In mid-afternoon. Jay, the pointer, prospecting around the
edge of the willow swamp, just back of the messtent, made a
point. William, observing it, picked up a gun and strolled over
that way. The artist sat still, and painted with one ear a-cock.
Presently William's gun spoke.

"What was it? Get him>" queried the artist, as William
came by, noting at the same time that Jay, at his heels, was looking
a bit puzzled, as if unable to account for something.

"No. Jacksnipe," answered William, as he took down the
cleaning rod and an oily rag, making ready to clean the gun,
though he had fired but one shot, prior to putting it up.

"Didn't you hold straight?"

" I did, but a jacksnipe doesn't fly straight." And in succinct
phrases the artist was made aware of the jacksnipe's dodging, zig-
zag flight at high speed, which makes him one of the most difficult
tests for the gunner's skill.

A heavy thunder-shower and a high wind came up shortly
after, in the face of which William, with Fred for oarsman, took
the boat, and went prospecting for duck. Driven back to camp
by stress of weather they reported nothing, though a large flight
of ducks was seen to pass east, north of camp, in late afternoon.

At sundown the storm ceased. In the east, from the horizon
to overhead, and scattering toward the west, there towered a solid
bank of deep blue-gray clouds. In thunderously blue depths they
filled the heavens, and from a stormy broken gray overhead, down
to the eastern horizon they deepened in tone to a gloomy indigo,
A scattering rain still sprinkled. In the west the clouds parted,
and from the break there came a sudden flood of brilliant golden
light which made firs and sagebrush banks rising to the east
fairly flame with aureal splendor against the blue depths of the far
horizon. At the same instant there sprang forth, crowning it all
with a yet more terrible beauty, a perfect rainbow. Its light-born
glory, to the eye seeming more than the half circle in height.

40 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

spanning the entire visible heaven from north to south, its crown
almost at the zenith, shone in a seven fold spectral splendor
brighter even than the golden loveliness of the landscape framed
within its triumphal sweep.

Slowly the pageant of the heavens departed, and with the
fading of the light, the camp, held in silence by the greatness of
the thing just seen, found its voice.

"A rainbow in the morning is the seaman's warning. A
rainbow at night is the seaman's delight," quoted the artist.
"We'll have fair weather to-morrow."

In this assurance the camp went to dinner on the trout
taken in the morning, with fresh bread, in place of soda biscuits,
sent over by the postmistress at Grayling, brought by Whitman,
together with a larger cookstove and camp sundries.

Under a cloudy sky, but secure in the rainbow's promise of
fair weather on the morrow, the camp made a peaceful end of
another day.

A TRIP FROM CAMP

Saturday the nineteenth.

"What's to-day, Jimmy?" queried Art.

"Saturday."

"Gee. You don't say so. Feels like we'd been away from
Chicago seventeen years — not that I miss anything. And the
days go fast, too. And we haven't been doing such an awful lot."

"Yes, don't they," regretted the artist. "And I 've got only
one pair of eyes and one pair of hands."

"The next week will go faster," assured William. "You
haven't seen the real stuff yet. We're going over to the north
fork this morning." You'd better pack some extra sketching
material."

With the boat loaded into the wagon, together with mid-day
grub, and shooting, fishing, and sketching "ictas," an early start
was made, with Jay for driver, William sharing the front seat with
him, and Art and the artist comfortably disposed on the boat,
with all the tobacco and matches they needed. The other Jay
trotted with vast content beside the wagon, and amused himself
hugely on the way by following grouse trails through the sage-
brush.

With dexterous care Whitman guided the heavy wagon
through fir brush and up the steep bank on to the plateau above.
Through fir woods standing in sage, and east of the southern end
of a great fir-crowned, rounding rise known as Horse Butte, we
came into lovely natural meadows of wild hay, which swept away
in long, subtly rolling curves to the crown of the butte south
and west, and to the north were bounded by a range of low hills,
thickly fir clad, beyond whose heights lies the Tepee basin. Pass-
ing the south end of Horse Butte a momentary glimpse is had of
Mount Sawtelle, 14,000 feet, far to the southwest, and a little
later, passing the pine woods that on the right had masked the view,
Mount Holmes, a ten-thousand-foot height in Yellowstone Park,
crowns the northern horizon. West, across the low heights of
Horse Butte, which extends some miles, marking the southern
boundary of the basin of the north fork, extends the great chain

Page 41

42 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

of the main Madison range, a blue wall of many-peaked majesty
that crowns and closes a far-stretching ocean of heaved gold that
brightens with the slant of sun upon the crown of a rise, and deep-
ens to the pale violet of the hollows, and the passage of a cloud
shadow, and in whose coulees and draws the aspens flame in orange
and brilliant gold.

Coming down the easy slope to the floor of the valley, the
north fork of the Madison, below the level of the prairie, makes a
wide and sinuous sweep among reed beds compassing numberless
islets of willow brush. Following the south bank to the west end
of the valley, a halt was made on the side of a great hill — a north-
ward extension of Horse Butte — above the water, close to the point
where, in a deep channel, the north fork leaves the lake. Here,
the horses unharnessed and left to graze, the two hunters with
Jay took the boat, and left the artist to his own devices.

Lying upon the hillside, one could but look, and look and
worship the very beauty of it. I sketched in haste. There was
but one pair of hands, and a day all too short. Wild duck passed
overhead or skimmed over the water below every few minutes.
A splendid fish hawk circled over the lake. A grass snake and a
great prairie cricket came up and fraternized with me. A badger
came to the mouth of his hole, a few feet in front and gazed curi-
ously at me. The interval before the hunters returned for lunch,
bringing back one mallard and a widgeon, was all too short.

After lunch. Art, Bill and Jay again departing in the boat
for further sport and exploration, the easel was shifted to a fresh
point commanding the far-off Madison canyon. This, a great
gap in the line of hills that closed the eastern horizon, marking
the point of emergence of the main stream, an ochreously bright
sky visible through its depths, combined with near at hand willow
banks and reed beds in the stream, snow- threatening clouds over-
head drifting across a clear sky, whose reflections were dragged
down in the water into long columns of gray light, and scattering
breaks of yellow sun marking the fast advancing afternoon, to
form a most impressive composition.

As I painted, wild bees embarrassed me much by continually
lighting on my palette, and diving head first into my colors, getting
themselves terribly messed up. Continually I had to lift them
out and put them on my coat sleeve, where at one time I had two

A Trip From Camp

43

or three wiping off the
paint and cleaning them-
selves. They mistook the
patches of bright pigment
for late wild flowers, I
assumed. It was notice-
able that they did not,
having cleaned themselves,
repeat the mistake. It was
a long, lonely, perfect
afternoon, with such a love-
liness of prairie, butte, still
river, purple and rose
mountains, and towering
cloud about one as fed to
the full a hungry soul.

Mallards, canvasback,
red-head, green-winged teal,
and wild geese were re-
ported by the fisher and
gunman, who returned at

^'Arthur landed his fish"

sundown with four mallards, six jacksnipe, one fine cut-throat
trout (Salmo Clarkii) and a grayling. The trout, between three
and three and one-half pounds, was struck by Art at the same
moment that William lifted his gun on a fine mallard. The mal-
lard dropped, and as William rowed to get the bird, Arthur landed
his fish. Beaver cuttings were reported.

On the road back to camp there came a most splendid burst
of rayed light from behind the mountains to the west, which, strik-
ing Mount Holmes, made it to glow with a deep rose light against
the great drifts of gray clouds that filled the northern sky. The
valley below was filled with a purplish haze, slightly broken here
and there by fields of sage. The haze deepened in tone toward
the northern distance till finally it merged into the deep violet-
gray of the pine forests at the base of the mountain. From this
pitch of tone the main peak rose in a jewel-like richness of deep
toned light that crowned the day with a slowly fading glory.

Reaching camp at dark, the flame of the campfire, seen
through the trees as we approached seemed uncommonly homelike

44 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

and welcoming. The place where is bed, board, and fire, though
it be but a square of cotton cloth on four sticks, is always home.

The trout taken during the afternoon furnished supper. A
royal fish, and royally prepared, inspired the artist to say, "God
bless the trout — aristocrat and king among fishes."

"We'll move camp to the north fork to-morrow," said
William. And with this, in a clear night, with sheet lightning
in the north, the camp slept.

THE SECOND CAMP

Sunday the twentieth.

The overcast sky and. the easy rain falling this morning were
cheerfully disregarded in the immediate prospect of jacksnipe
on toast and marmalade for breakfast.

This concluded, Fred went to work with Jay to strike the
cook tent, and load it with its stove and provisions into the wagon,
as the first load to be taken to the new camp.

This going forward, Bill took a bath and shaved, and desired
express mention of the fact in this record for the benefit of whom
it might concern. Overhearing this. Art also desired mention
of the fact that this was also the day of his annual altogether
ablution.

In the middle of the morning strolled in Fred Lamoreaux;
a French-Canadian acquaintance of Bill's, from his ranch in the
north fork valley. In small occupations and packing of personal
belongings the morning went, till the return of the wagon. Then,
after lunch, the remaining three tents struck, the boat and all
other "ictas" loaded, in a drizzling rain. Art and Jim in their old
place on the rear of the load, we bade farewell to the old camp, and
set our faces for the new. The rain continued, a steady quiet
dropping that promised damp ground, a general steaminess, and
the fullest use for the rubber sheets that in this outfit underlie
all beds. Camp was reached shortly before mid-afternoon, on the
river bottoms just under the big hill at the west end of the valley,
on the north side of the river, opposite and some distance up
stream from the point visited the day preceding.

In a busy hour and a half after arrival at the new ground,
tents were pitched, rubber sheets spread, and beds made with
fresh hay brought from a ranch near at hand. There is no wood
at hand where we are now camped, merely sage and prairie rose
brush. Consequently, we have no campfire. The cook stove
in the cook tent, and an ordinary camp stove in the sleeping tent
were fed with such wood as could be brought from the old camp,
but nevertheless we are very comfortable though the messtent
is a bit damp.

Page 45

46

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

William and Arthur, in spite of the
weather, go to their sempiternal game of
rhum, which they play with a business-
like earnestness impressive to observe.
It supplies to them the place of all other
things they might do, and very much
worse, for they are
the gentlemen appar-
ently who invented
the game. Arthur's
great point of play
appears to a casual
onlooker to be in
holding cards, and
William's in freely
drawing and discard-
ing with an uncanny
prescience, be it said,
of what he is likely
to catch. Arthur's
coups take time to
prepare, but they land with the effectiveness of a twelve-inch
shell from a siege gun.

Last evening's mallards with boiled potatoes and soda bis-
cuit, and, of course, sundry trimmings from cans and bottles, made
dinner. There is a heavy Scotch mist outside. Geese and ducks
are haunting the marshes, and helped out by a distant band of
coyotes, make the night eerie with their calls. With cheerful com-
pany in the messtent, and a warm stove in the sleeping tent, in
spite of the weather, all's well.

It goes on forever

Monday the twenty-first.

A cloudy, chilly dawn, with a sodden feeling left over from
the previous evening's rain, yet presented its own peculiar beauty.
Below the lowering clouds in the east, a lovely pale lemon glow
filled the width of the Madison canyon, and made its abrupt
sides, seen at this distance, loom against the sky with startling
impressiveness. From this point of illumination the golden light

The Second Camp 47

diffused under a level ceiling of gray cloud that forwardly over-
head broke against clear sky. Against the light low in the east,
the rising sage benches retired in gray bulks of successively lighter
tone into the distance, with here and there on the crest of a rise,
a hint of golden light from the dawn. A half seen wagon trail
vanished in a roll of sage. A chill wind stirred. Isolate, still
with the stillness of the dawn, it was beautiful in its forsakenness.

Presently a breeze sprang up, dispersing the clouds, the sun
came forth in his strength, the cloud flocks gathered themselves
into the hollows of the hills to the north, and presently went
away. It was warm and clear by mid-morning.

The first thing, of course, was firewood. One evening with-
out a campfire was well enough in its way when it could not be
helped, but it could not happen twice with comfort. So, with
axe and cross-cut saw loaded. Jay went away early with the wagon
to get the week's supply of wood.

Bill and Art were early away in the boat with rod and gun,
and the artist to painting on the rise west of camp. Here grouse
were plentiful in the sagebrush. Fresh earth was at many badger
holes. A pair of eagles were seen in mid-afternoon, tilting and
sliding on the wind in great circles till lost sight of in a cloud.

The situation of the camp is of uncommon beauty. The
door of the messtent faces the range of mountains that bounds
the north side of the valley. West and south of the camp is a field
of willow brush, brokenly contouring the edge of the deep
channel on the south that separates it from the big hill that shelters
it in that quarter, and westward opens into a wide stretch of still
water studded with islets of willow near the sloping banks of sage
that lie point beyond point to the northwest. To the northwest
the view over the water is bounded by the goldenly gray bulk of
the western slope of the northern hills, on whose sides in sheltered
hollows the aspens flame in golden beauty. The western horizon
is closed in by the tail of the southern sheltering hill, and farther
off, across the blue water, a part of the Madison range, just a
short length visible between the near hills. All day this is a con-
tinually shifting and changing harmony of blue and colorful gray,
with a splendid flash of copper light on some great shoulder of
bare rock as the afternoon sun slants redly down. At evening the
tones change to deepest violet as the light leaves the sky, until

48

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

in the splendid starlight, one can just make out, and more forcibly,
feel, the solemn bulk of the mountains against the heavens.

Eastward, the river loses itself around a curve in a pleasant
vista of willow brush and reed beds, its calm surface a sapphire-
like blue in contrast to the rich gold of the hay meadows that on
its southern bank rise gradually to the crown of Horse Butte,

=^«^fc^'^". ^

St*r/

''^"•^^^M-^'i ^^^ "Eastward, the river loses itself"

;*=UJL^^

whose eastern end, fir forested, is just visible past the side of the
sheltering hill across the water. There is a hint of blue-green sage
in the mid-distance, above which rises, across almost the entire
eastern horizon a belt of firs, whose darkness renders more dis-
tantly blue than ever the low band of hills that marks the eastern
horizon, in whose center drops the Madison canyon, a great
square-sided gap through whose far depths there sometimes shows
an infinitely far-off mass of cloud, minute by distance, glowing
in the light that pours through the gap at evening with a precious-
ness of color that stirs a painter's heart to a fresh thankfulness for
sight.

A little after noon Wroe and Pratt returned with eight duck,
(one a mallard drake in large flesh and splendid feather), three
jacksnipe, and a three and one-half pound cut- throat trout, a
magnificent fish, taken on a spoon. The beauty was hooked in
both upper and lower jaws. He was played by Arthur for seven
or eight minutes before he had his first sight of him. In the next

The Second Camp 49

ten minutes three attempts were made to get the net under him,
the speckled warrior fighting fiercely, and still continuing the
battle in the boat.

In the late afternoon Jay returned with a wagonload of fir
logs for firewood. With axe and saw, in a few minutes a backlog
and the lesser members of a properly constituted campfire were
ready. With deft hand a piece of dry, straight-grained pine was
shaved along one side into affringile filaments. This, and a couple
more like it, placed slantingly against the backlog, itself with its side
against the wind, had piled slantingly open over them, in a roughly
conical form, a few heavier dry sticks, on top of which came two
or three light logs, their weight supported by the backlog. A
match was struck, and in the sheltering palm applied to the loose
filaments of the first prepared pieces. In two minutes a lusty
flame was leaping, and with it the nomad's sky-roofed home
fairly established. A chill wind from the west, and a snow storm
visible on Mount Holmes northeast of camp made the comfort-
diffusing blaze the more welcome.

The hunters, out until after sundown, returned with a lean
bag. Ducks were passing up and down continually, but the light
was bad, and a duck flying low at sundown against a background
of gray hill does not offer a very positive mark to sight on.

A clear sky at evening, and a bite to the wind, promising a
frosty night and fair weather on the morrow. The light of the
messtent, with the still-continuing contest of Art against Bill's
unspeakable luck still going on, and the warmth of the fire feel
none the less comfortable for the yelling of some unknown number ,
of coyotes within a short distance of camp. It is difficult to accu-
rately estimate their number, for one can make himself sound like
fifty. The yelping howl of the coyote is probably the most charac-
teristic night sound of the Montana plains.

COMMENTS AND STORIES

The stars are the glory of a Montana night. At no time
perhaps are the heavens so terribly splendid as in the still hours
between the after-midnight and the false dawn — the primam
luce of Caesar. To see the boreal splendor of the north, the
coldly ha^y fire of the Milky Way over head, and in the south
Orion striding the sky, followed by his dogs in processional glory,
the dog star blazing like a nocturnal but far-off sun, brings
keenly to mind the dignity of George Sterling's mighty verse:

O armies of eternal night,

How flame your guidons on the dark
Silent we turn from Time to mark

What final orders sway your might.

Cold from colossal ramparts gleam

From their insuperable posts

The seven princes of the hosts
Who guard the holy north supreme.

What music from Capella runs

How hold the Pleiades their bond

How storms the hidden war beyond
Orion's dreadful sword of suns.

• • • •

O Night, what legions serve thy wars

Lol thy terrific battle line

The rayless bulk, the blazing Sign
The leagued infinity of stars 1

So much, at least, may one get for reward of getting up to
tend campfire at four o'clock of a frosty morning, even though
for that break in the after-sleep, the spreading fire of the dawn
be foregone for later slumber. The expectation of this was not
realized, for the camp was aroused before sunrise, and settled
to breakfast just as the sun showed, a pale gold disk through
the frosty haze, in the opening of the Madison gap.

Before the sun, the mist that at dawn had settled on the
water began to roll and lift. Distant islets began to show, and
on the mirror-like water, whitely still under the hanging vapor,

50

Comments and Stories 51

odd pairs of ducks leisurely paddled. The distant shore still
invisible the gray-gold slopes of the hill to the northwest of camp,
rose above the retreating cloud. Above its irregularly rolling,
slowly changing bulk of white the Madison crests showed clear,
coldly blue and seeming infinitely far removed. A ray of sun-
light flew clear, above the morning haze on the eastern sage
benches, and fell upon the mountain tops. Against the far sky
of calm blue-green fire behind them, each peak, each projecting
shoulder and crag suddenly flamed in crimson fire, whose flare
spread and broadened, and paled under the advancing sun, till
with the vanishing of the matin mists, the hills were full clad
in their luminously blue livery of the full day.

At breakfast Art was directed by the colonel of the camp
to put on his waders and do some real work. The waders, being
new, had to now been held by Art for the purpose of admiration,
as well by a wholesome fear of a rift in their continuity by possibly
getting them snagged. Anyway Arthur put them on, for much
the same reason that the artist, comfortably rolled in his blank-
ets, on being asked by William if he would like to have breakfast
with the rest of the camp, promptly declared his consuming
pleasure at being permitted to do so.

This was a still clear day with no wind till the middle of
the afternoon. In the forenoon, a visitor came into camp on
a very hairy cayuse, in the person of an exceedingly ragged small
boy, with his second crop of teeth perceptibly erupting and who
betrayed much interest in the doings of the artist, to whom he
confided the fact that he went to school, was in the fourth book
and loved to figure. After watching the painter in silence for
some time, he ventured a query as to the ultimate disposal of
the product on the easel. Being informed that sometimes they
were sold, the youngster responded in all honesty: "I didn't
know people bought those things. "

The motor was shipped on the boat this afternoon, and a
line trailed astern with a spoon. Two fine Salmo Clarkii, weigh-
ing respectively two and two and a half pounds were obtained as a
result and furnished supper. A cloudless sky all day and a very
nearly clear sky in the west at sunset, no wind, and frost in the air.

After supper, the logs on the campfire were flaming with bril-
liant and unusual colors: pale violet blue and bluish green. The

52 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

hunters played some more rhum to their entire content, the
continual interest of Fred and the polite tolerance of the artist.

The artist was rebuked by the camp colonel for being in-
sufficiently provided with socks, and suffered a kindly criticism
of the weight and quality of the blankets he had provided him-
self with. As it appeared that one or two more might have made
good their deficiency of weight and substance, he was assured
by Fred that "when you comes into this country the thing you
need most darn bad is a good pack — golly, you should have a
big pack — und it is better you should haf one blanket too many
than not enough by one ven you needs him most." Also after
supper the artist was warned by the same friendly mentor that
he should not "sdick your feet oudt of der tent, or, py golly,
you gets them cold again as you did last night." From this Fred
proceeded to a mention of a winter camp in 50° minus, as an
ordinary experience in which was moisture formed frost some
three inches thick on the under side of the tent roof, "und if
you touch him, py golly, down she comes, und knocks der stuffing
oudt of you."

From the artist this brought a tale of a western friend who
somewhere in the Canadian Selkirks received a military dig-
nitary from home who was a big game hunter, and who had
unwisely set his heart on a grizzly bear hide in the dead of winter.
Regardless of all representations as to the winter habits of the
animal and the difficulties and hardships of the trip, he insisted
on his point, and accordingly was taken by the guide to the foot
of the Asulkan Glacier. An old and hardened man of the open,
the guide camped in the snow by the fire, in a sleeping bag, while
the major retired to his little tent with a coal-oil stove which kept
the ease-loving warrior warm. In the words of the original
narrator: "It was cold. It froze whisky solid, but that didn't
feaze me. I'd seen it once or twice before. But one night after
we had made camp and turned in, me to the bag by the fire, and
the major to his tent and his stove, I was just hugging myself
and trying to believe I was getting warm when I heard footsteps
on the snow close beside me. I lifted the bag flap and peeked out.
Here was the major making preparations to camp out in the
snow with the rest of us. Says I, 'Major, wouldn't you be
better off in your tent?' and he answers, * I reckon I would,

Comments and Stories 53

Redgrave, I reckon I would, but I can't go to sleep with a light
burning. I lit a candle a little while ago to read by a while before
I went to sleep, and now I can't blow the dam thing out. The
flame's froze.'"

In the awed silence that fell upon the camp William took
the floor with a recollection of another military big gun and game
hunter who was entertained as a special guest at a country house
in the Scots Highlands. Among those bidden to meet this colonel
at dinner, was a near-by laird, a dourly doubtful and cannily
speaking old gentleman. At dinner, the colonel, being asked for
a recital of his greatest exploit, enlarged at length, with much
circumstantiality of detail, upon the chase and final slaughter
of a man-eating tiger of uncommon ferocity and appetite that
for long had been the scourge of a dozen native villages in upper
India. With breathless interest the listeners followed the colonel
to the death, and with awed respect received the incidental detail
of the tiger's size, twenty-six feet from nose to tail tip.

The laird was moved thereby to a recital of the capture of
a great skate that for years had been known to be upon the sea
bottom in the vicinity of his home. So vast was the fish that a
careless cartographer making a survey of the coast, noting its
lightness in the depths, had charted it as a sandbank, and a
fishing boat or so seeking anchorage, their anchors having caught
in its mouth and tormenting it, had been badly broken up by
the monster's consequent struggle to free itself, which be it said,
had given it no special effort. With Scots particularity, the
laird went into the details of the construction of a wrecking-
scow, the provision of derricks and winches of a dockyard type,
and the devising and forging of grabhooks of an unique pattern
for the ultimate capture of the deep-sea monster. From one
incident to another, each more grotesquely improbably probable,
the laird proceeded to its final landing and its size and weight,
some odd forty feet broad by a hundred long, and seventy tons
or so. The colonel chose to take the recital as a satirical re-
flection on his own exploit and protested strongly to his host
at the insult that, as he said, had been offered him in the house
where he was a guest. He demanded immediate amends as the
alternative to his departure. His host went to the laird, and
made representation of the state of the case, and asked that he

54 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

should make such an amende as would satisfy his guest. In no
wise feeling bound to put himself in the wrong because he might
or might not have doubted the colonel's tale, and with the story
teller's pride in his own successful creation, the old laird with Scots
stubbornness rejoined, "Aweel, mon, ye can tell the colonel that
if he'll take a bit off the tail of the teeger we'll see what can be
doon aboot the skate."

Amid further desultory talk, Fred, again moved to cold
weather reminiscences, instanced an occasion when he froze his
nose. To him the artist: "That was surely some cold, Fred,
for a man's nose, you know, is reckoned a warm member." "Yes,
dot's all right, but, py golly, der trouble is she sdicks oudt so
far." A wicked and Shandean burst of laughter greeted this as
the artist murmured sotto voce, " I wish the good Tristram could
have heard that; he might have added another paragraph to the
famous chapter on noses."

Here the camp went to bed, all well, but that the artist was
still irrepressibly chuckling.

TWO CASUAL DAYS

Wednesday the twenty-third.

This day was fair and warm, positively hot at noonday, after
a frosty fog in the early morning.

After breakfast the two sportsmen went to rifle practice and
adjustment of sights. The marksmen were amusedly embar-
rassed by the excited interest of the artist, who with a pair of field
glasses, in their rear, tried to keep tab on shots and call points,
such as were made, for them. A heat haze rising from the prairie
made the target, a sheet of paper with a three-inch bull's-eye and
a ten-inch outer circle, at two hundred yards, waver visibly, making
accurate sighting a difficult proposition.

In the afternoon, the artist, with Fred, walked to Grayling
postoffice, a mile or so northeast over the prairie, and at the
entrance of Red canyon, for so is the great opening in the northern
hills named, up which, in a few days more, it is announced, the
party will journey over the trail to Tepee basin, fifteen hundred
feet higher up.

Grayling postoffice, so named from the fish found plentifully
in the nearby river, is a small
log building with a tarred felt
roof, standing in the dooryard of
Peter Kerzenmacher. The
postmaster, Peter, is of German
birth, twenty-four years in this
country and this particular
section, a heavy set but active
man. He is dark and slow
spoken, with an illuminating
smile and a handgrip that in-
spires utter confidence in him
as a solid rock of friendly de-
pendability.

The first representative of
the Kerzenmacher establish-
ment, official and otherwise, "Peter"

/

Page 55

56 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

encountered, however, was Mistress Kerzenmacher herself, when
Fred, with the matter-of-course at-home-ness of this section of
the West, placed his hand on the knob of the house door, and
without knocking, walked into the lady's kitchen, followed by the
artist, immediately thereafter presented to its mistress. Mrs.
Kerzenmacher, a comely woman well above the average stature,
with a fresh clear skin, of an attractive neatness of person and
appointments, received her visitors with a fineness of manner
that left no sort of doubt of their welcome. The lady's steady,
<lirect gaze, a poise of manner that showed a very complete
mastery of all possible exigencies of the life of a rancher's wife,
a clear voice of an agreeable pitch, together with a certain dignity
of bearing, coupled with a genial and sincere courtesy to her guests,
well prepared one for the further discovery that she was of High-
land Scots descent, but one generation removed from Gaelic-
speaking forbears who had settled in Southern Pennsylvania.

The windows of a bright, fresh kitchen were filled with prize
geraniums, products of Mrs. Kerzenmacher's skill and care.
Grown in tomato cans, with sturdy, full leafed stems, each plant
bore a massive head of bloom, some two or three, with each single
floret developed to the full. Ranging in color from the palest
rose to the deepest crimson, they were worthy to rank with the
finest of prize flowers that the writer could recollect ever having
seen at sundry flower shows in past years. Raised in the first
instance from seed, and thereafter by slips, from the strongest
plants, with a professional gardener's skill shown in crossing the
different strains, nursed through the unspeakable chills of Montana
winters, a continual feast of perfume and pleasure the year round,
they were an eloquent testimony to an innate love of beauty.

Her two boys, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with deep chests and
broad shoulders, had a strong fineness of the open air and moun-
tains about them that made the city children imaged freshly in
the artist's recollection, appear coarse beside them, or where not
that, unhealthy and under-developed.

Other company present in the Kerzenmacher kitchen were
Miss Sontag the local school ma'am, Mrs. Fred Lamoureaux
with her baby, and Jack Dolan, the mail carrier between Grayling
and Lake, Idaho, thirty-five miles away, making the trip three
times a week.

Two Casual Days 57

From the Kerzenmacher dooryard, the sight of the Madison
range, completely closing in the western horizon from north to
south, is a sight of dignified splendor. Seen across a widespread
foreground of rolling prairie, golden tawny in the afternoon sun,
they present a long drawn rampart against the heaven of the
loveliest and most variedly luminous blues that the painter may
ever note, within which a deeper note shows either some forward-
advancing lesser height, on whose slopes the slanting sun may
strike a note of deep greenish gold on the crowns of the blue pines,
or some tremendous ravine whose depth is to be reckoned perhaps
in miles, yet at this distance betrayed by but a slight and airy
deepening of the blue harmony. At sundown the blues change
to a deep chord of violet that one can almost hear — that does in
truth, choir and chant in deep-toned harmony with the glowing
sky above. It is not an uncommon thing for a painter, speaking
of a successfully achieved color harmony, to say that it sings.
Here, if anywhere, is the sound suggestiveness of color made man-
ifest, by the hand of Nature herself.

Among the relics of early days in Gallatin County noted at
Peters', was a pair of buffalo horns mounted on the frontal plate
of the original skull, twelve inches between the base of the
horns, twenty-one and one-half inches wide between the incurv-
ing tips, and each horn twelve inches in circumference at the
base. Peter kindly offered to give the artist the horns.

Grayling post-
office serves a com-
munity of a dozen
scattered ranches ly-
ing in the Madison
basin, each a mile or
so from its neighbor,
and the farthest
perhaps half a dozen miles away from the postoffice. It takes
care also of mail of all kinds coming for prospectors, surveyors,
hunters, guides, construction engineers and camps, and such like
miscellaneous temporary sojourners and passersby within its field
of service. The mail service, regular enough in the summer and
fall — there is no spring — summer comes with a rush and a bang
— is sometimes interrupted for weeks at a time in the winter by

58 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

stress of weather. The mail reaches Grayling from Monida,
Montana, ninety miles distant by stage and special mail drivers
three times a week (in good weather). Monida being the nearest
railroad postoffice to which there is train service twelve months
in the year. A temperature of fifty degrees below zero is not
uncommon, and though in still, dry air, more common in the
winter than not, this is bearable, yet the raging fierceness of a
storm driven by the thousand-edged wind that comes off the
heights about the valley is something the flat-dweller, wrapped
about in artificial warmth, can only dimly surmise.

Walking back to camp, the artist made note of the changing
beauty of color shown by the sagebrush. In a steady light locally
of a pale greenish gray, in wide areas it responds to the sky above,
and the changing angle of the sunlight almost as water does.
In late afternoon with the sun an hour from the Occident, the upper
tufts, heaving with the contour of the ground beneath in wave-like
rolls, take numberless tones of golden light, from the palest lemon
to the ruddiest orange, bathing the middle distance of the prairie
in a floating haze of light, broken as it comes near the eye by the
violet bloom of the shadowed side of the clumps. A little nearer
yet, and the separate clumps show a golden crest upon a lovely
violet tone of under foliage, below which again the contorted stems,
in their twistings flowing with a marked and typical rhythm, tell
in still deeper violet grays against the brightly tawny dried grass
between. Not uncommonly when a lemon light falls from the
sky, foliage tufts and stems in shadow will show in light and dark
tones of red-violet gray. Far off, in the extreme distance, it lies
under the sky in pale fields and strips of grayish green, sometimes
inclining distinctly to pale blue. The upstanding dried flower
stems, visible only near at hand, take always the color of the
dominant light.

Arrived back at camp it was found that the sportsmen
were out with rod and line just before sundown, but without
results. There was teal for dinner, the table graced with gerani-
ums sent to the camp by Mrs. Kerzenmacher, with her com-
pliments. Afterward came letters, and then the sempiternal
game of rhum, at which Art effected several ponderous coups,
and so to bed, with coyotes yelling on all thirty-six points of
the compass.

Two Casual Days 59

Thunday the twenty -fourth.

The strengthening sun had barely dissipated the fog and frost
of early morning before the camp was honored with a visit from
the local game warden. The gentleman, genial enough of per-
sonal disposition, yet seemed to take it as an affront to his official
dignity that the cook and horse wrangler with the party were not
residents of the state of Montana, and was pragmatically insistent
on a certain clause of the state game laws providing that any
person employed by a hunting party as cook or packer shall be
esteemed a guide within the meaning of the act, and therefore
liable to a license fee of ten dollars in addition to being as required
by the sections covering the licensing of guides, "competent and
of good moral character." The act appears incomplete in this
section, inasmuch as it does not specify in what the item of com-
petence shall consist. William dug up a copy of the statutes and
showed the warden that the act also clearly provided that but one
guide to each party was required to be a resident of Montana,
and the warden reluctantly admitted that perhaps that was true,
though obviously far from satisfied.

The morning was given up to correspondence, and a hot
afternoon following to some companionable loafing, and tinkering
up the stern of the boat to provide a firmer seating for the motor.
Trout were rising freely between four and six o'clock to small
midges, of which clouds were in the air over the water. Fewer
ducks were observed to-day than at any time previously. They
have apparently become aware of the camp and are taking another
route in preference to following their accustomed course from the
lake along the river.

The persistence of the two men other than the inditer hereof
in devotion to their card game has caused the artist to remark
that his principal recollection of this trip will be of one sempi-
ternal shuffle, deal and discard against a background of sagebrush,
mountains, and evening glows, pointed by alarums and excursions
after duck and trout, and coyotes, of which at this present writing
there are apparently fifty or so yelping their souls out to the stars
within three hundred yards of camp. Jay, absent for a couple of
days, came back from Henry Lake to-night. A clear and frosty
night, and so ends this day all well.

THE ARTIST GOES A-FISHING

Friday the twenty-fifth.

The morning opened clear with Uttle frost, the matin mist
rising from the prairie as the sun reached the horizon, and permit-
ting a clear view of its disk, lemon gold through the haze.

Fred and Jay departed immediately after breakfast to Yellow-
stone, Fred to be gone for two days. William and Art took their
way up the river for fish, and any duck that might come their
way. The camp deserted before eight o'clock, the artist spent a
long morning alone, elaborating an evening sketch till the return
of the fishers some time after one, with five fine trout and a gray-
ling. The heaviest of the trout in the morning's catch weighed
three and three-quarters pounds. The average throughout was
a trifle over three pounds. The catch was made on a No. 10
Reuben Wood fly, and a No. 8 Jock Scott. Wild geese were
reported by the fishers as having passed close overhead while
they were close under a bank where the geese did not see them.

In the afternoon the colonel of the camp took out the artist^
who, besides being hard of hearing is chronically and absent-
mindedly engrossed in the admiration of the beauties about him.
Consequently the colonel as skipper of the transrivum expedition
had his troubles with the crew, to say nothing of a leaky boat and
frequent shallows, which, the crew failing to announce them, at such
times being most deeply absorbed in the unfolding vistas of the
loveliest little river in the country, necessitated the skipper's
quite frequently stepping overboard and towing the boat, foremast
hand and all.

At the fishing grounds, with kindly authority, the artist was
initiated by William into the mysteries of bending on a leader and
its complement of flies, and proceeded in as amateurish a fashion
as could well be conceived, to do his best to master the art of
casting a fly with a trifle less noise than if he were pitching a ten-
penny nail into the water. William's patience was infinite and
his large-souled unselfishness in posting his scholar on the most
promising water is a sportsmanlike example to all true anglers.
Within ten minutes the artist laid aside his rod the better to

Page 60

The Artist Goes A -Fishing

6f

observe the easy grace of William's handling of a big trout that
had taken a Queen of the Waters with a rush and a plunge. This
one, neatly "grassed" on a shelving bank without troubling the
landing net, served as a further means of demonstration to the
scholar of the correct mode of grasping, unhooking, stunning, and
stringing a fish on a cut willow twig. Back to his casting went
the artist mentally repeating the running admonitions of hia
master in the gentle art. Turning his head a few minutes later, he
beheld with fresh delight the graceful arch of the senior's rod as he
came down the water from round the bend with yet another great
fellow on his line, fairly hooked. To the scholar the rod was
handed, the splendid speckled warrior on the line having already
been played for ten
minutes, and here, the
master's rod and own
fish in his hands, was
the scholar, under
direction, allowed the
privilege of finally
playing and landing
the greatest fish of
the afternoon, a four-
pound Salmo Clarkii.
Upstream then a hun-
dred yards, where, at
the mouth of a little
creek, the water pul-
sating with a mother-
of-pearl iridescence in
the evening light, the
great fish rose and leaped every passing
minute. Here, the while the scholar
practiced his casting, were two more
great beauties, taken on a Royal Coach-
man, added by William to the score.
Now it was sundown and the dark at hand.
Downstream ahead of William to the boat anc
the water originally fished, a few more casts
were made by the scholar. Then triumphantly

62

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

c

A heavy fish

downstream came William, holding up two
fingers with his disengaged hand. Two at
once, a grayling and a small trout. These
were grassed and strung, the while a cock
willow grouse ruffled his feathers not twenty

The Artist Goes A -Fishing 63

feet away. Darkness was now at hand and. a young moon
in the sky. WilHam showed a Mississippi pilot's memory for
marks, deeps, and shoals, and performed such an excellent
job of navigation in the dark as caused Arthur to remark on
landing, that he stood in danger of arrest for piloting without
a license. The entire day's catch, ten trout and two gray-
ling, averaged two and one-quarter pounds, the heaviest, as
recorded, four pounds.

And here the writer hereof sets it down, that if there is any
thrill greater than that of seeing a master of the gentle craft handle
and land a heavy fish, save perhaps that from doing the trick
oneself, he has yet to experience it. William's cast is an expression
of efficiency in the nth power. His rod goes back with an easy
sweep of the wrist, with no waste motion, the line unrolls
through the air and drops the fly at the destined spot easily
as a thistledown. By the results achieved, William's aphor-
ism, "Get your cast to working right and you'll catch fish,"
is fully justified.

Trout for supper. An overcast sky, a cheerful campfire, two
fisherman chaps in their to-be-continued-everlastingly card game,
the artist after a royal day sleepy as a tired pup, and with the
despatch of all fish more than the camp needed to Kerzenmacher,
the local postmaster, and a nearby ranch, so ends this day
all well.

Saturday the twenty-sixth.

The day was heavily overcast, with occasional breaks of sun
and a strong wind — a good time for sticking around camp and get-
ting away with the dozen or so trifling jobs that have been shifted
forward from day to day for an opportunity that would not trench
on possible sport. At any rate, so the morning passed. And
then it was decided that the artist should again go a-fishing, since
he seemed inclined to stick so close to his easel as to run a serious
chance of not getting any sport at all unless somebody woke him
up, and showed it to him.

"Jimmy and I will take the boat," announced the colonel,
"and you'll walk. Art."

"What do I want to walk for? I'd just as soon ride."

"Not this time. You'll have to walk a dozen miles or so a

64

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

day, after elk next week, so you might as well get into training
now."

Arthur is obedient, be it observed, but to the discerning eye
may be seen to have his own thoughts on the matter. There are
few who make such a cheerful virtue of necessity.

The passage to the trouting grounds, the same stretch of
water as was visited on the day before, was made almost fault-
lessly, with but a single shoaling, and the cook and captain bold
overboard to tow the gallant and sievelike craft off a bar only once.
On the way up, a colony of barn-swallows' nests were noted
beneath the edge of a cut bank overhanging the water. Bee-hive
shaped, of clay, each with its little round doorway at the apex,
they stuck out horizontally from the face of the bank. A grebe
or two made his jerky twisting plunge, and odd pairs of duck

squawked away before our passage.
A heron lazily rose and trailed off
over the willow tops to a new
solitude. The very spirit of after-
noon peace was in the land.

Quite a breeze, fitfully dying
down at intervals, ruffled the water
on reaching the fishing ground.
Rods set up and leaders bent on, the
triad went to work. Art working
down, and Bill and his scholar up-
stream, with a passing salutation
to a solitary and hopeless rancher
on the opposite bank, who was
pessimistically experimenting with
grasshoppers. There was nothing
doing either side of the stream for
some minutes. Then the artist and
William simultaneously hooked a two-pound whitefish apiece.
In the course of the fishing period William hooked and landed
one more, rather to his own and the artist's boredom, for the
whitefish is not a pretty fish, with coarse scaling, an evil neutral
gray-green color, and a sucker mouth.

The fishers waded and worked under the edge of thick willow
brush, its topmost branches a dozen feet high. This called for

The Jlrtist Goes A-Fhhing

65

some care in making the back cast to avoid fouling the line.
Beyond the edge of the shadow thrown by this, the water, still
between passing wind riffles, showed a placid beauty of reflected
color from the heavens overhead, for it was close on sundown — a
quietly heaving sheet of rose pearl, pale green and blue fire, broken
with yet deeper blue where a catspaw struck it. At its farther
edge, the golden light of the sun-lit reed beds struck vertically
down into the sky reflections, making the water appear more
brilliant still by complementary opposition.

JMk

''Mount Holmes

dominated the

evening stillness''

Above reed beds and hay meadows, together a far-stretching
sheet of quivering tawny gold, far away the sage hills began to
rise, lying east and west in sliding inclines that took the eye,
halting here and there on the dark accent of some group or band
of distant pines, to the crown of the blue foothills. And from the
broken gold of the near ground, the gray gold of the sage hills,
the foundational blue of the foothills, in the red, red flame of the
large last gleam, majestic against the low lying pale violet clouds
of the northern horizon, through whose rifts an elusively pale
green sky showed in lesser light. Mount Holmes dominated the
evening stillness.

One good trout was hooked and landed by William just
after sundown, a three pound cut-throat. This, with the other less
desirable fish were passed across stream to the unlucky rancher,
who thankfully bore them home. A heavy thunderstorm was

66 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

raging on the mountain ranges on the way home, and at supper
a stiff wind and some rain struck the camp. At the end of the
evening the wind had dropped and the stars were out with a
few drifting clouds and a fair promise of a good day on the
morrow.

A CAMP SUNDAY

Sunday the twenty -stt)entK
Noting the cloudy, stormy sky, a feel of rain in the air,
and a struggling sun in the east, the artist, before the messtent
door, quoted:

"As breaks the sun through overmastering clouds
So honor peereth in the meanest habit.
What, is the adder better than the eel
Because his painted skin contents the eye?
Or is the jay more precious than the lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?"

"Gee" commented Art, rolling his ante-breakfast cigarette
near by. "You've got something like that for most every oc-
casion, haven't you?"

"Merely a habit of memory" he was assured. "Had it
from my dad. The governor was an inveterate quoter, and I
believe made a perfect nuisance of himself sometimes."

This day was William's birthday, and however the knowledge
of it got abroad in the valley, shortly after breakfast arrived
the local schoolmistress, fair, curly-haired, spectacled as befitted
her official dignity, young and altogether good to look upon,
in a divided skirt astride of a dark roan. A scholar on a light
bay pony was her attendant squire, bearing a three-layer birth-
day cake, a friendly tribute to William's excellence of social
quality from the Mistress Kerzenmacher, before-mentioned in
the record. A cake "as was a cake," it signalized the natal day
of the camp colonel and graced the board at dinner this evening.
In addition to the gastronomic tribute to the colonel's popu-
larity, the giftbearer brought sundry letters from home, the
major part for the honor of William's natality. These, added
to sundry packages and letters entrusted to the artist for de-
livery on this day, and arranged at William's place at breakfast,
gave affairs in the messtent a busily festive appearance.

The artist ventured that it looked like a good day.

"For what?" inquired William.

"Duck."

Page 67

68 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

"What makes you think it's a good day for duck. If I want
to get the truth out of you, I have to ."

The artist broke in. "There was a heavy wind last night,
and a storm. That would have driven them from the lake into
the shelter of the reed beds and willow channels. It won't clear
till afternoon, if at all, and then you'll have a chance for the
trout again."

Sceptical or not, William and Arthur took the artist at his
word and departed, returning at noon with some fine mallards,
one bird rather heavier and fuller fleshed than the rest.

After lunch came out leader boxes, fly books, envelopes of
feathers of many kinds and tints, papers of hooks, odd twists of
silk floss of gay color, twists of tinsel, gold and silver thread,
and all the small impedimenta dear to the fly fisher's heart.
With leaders and snells soaking in a bowl of warm water beside
him, to work William went in craftsmanlike fashion, in the con-
triving of flies of new and strange alluringness to match one
taken by the artist from the water the preceding evening, to
which the trout were then rising freely. A blunt nosed pair of
small scissors hanging on his dexter little finger, for convenience
in dividing strands of gut and silk, and trimming feathers,
William discoursed of the mysteries of fly building, the while he
whipped a bunch of feathers to the shank of a hook. The whip-
ping concluded, came the moment of final trimming. With
confident hand the craftsman groped upon the table, as he eyed
the all but completed creation upon the snell. "As I was say-
ing— Now, where are those scissors?" And further he rummaged,
while Art and the artist exchanged glances. With methodical
care the searcher explored the table. "Now, I know I had those
scissors a minute ago." The table searched, in growing resent-
ment at the innate depravity of inanimate things, the search was
transferred to the trunk from which the box of fly-making material
had come forth. Vocal protest, half breathed, began to make
the air blue, and the sulphurous fire began to sizzle along the
edges of the woodwork within a sotto voce vocal range. A
half-suppressed snicker caught the searcher's ear. He gazed,
his eye traveled to his own minor digit, where the missing im-
plement obediently hung.

"Allright, they're on me," and with this neat double

A Camp Sunday 69

entendre was discomfiture transformed into the triumph of a
well turned phrase.

"It wasn't so bad, Bill" comforted the artist. "You might
have done worse. You might have mislaid yourself, as an ac-
quaintance of mine did once." And here he proceeded to a
recital of the phenomenal absent-mindedness of one Squiggs, one
of those quaintly learned, semi-professional specialists on ob-
scure things, who occasionally appear at high fees in the law
courts. A precise, methodical man, as befitted his occupation,
he was accustomed to leave his office for lunch, at the same time
every day to a dot. Having no office boy or stenographer, he
was used to hang upon his office door a neatly written card
announcing his return at one-thirty. As regularly as he went,
he returned, to the second. One day, some unobserved con-
catenation of circumstances brought him back to his office a full
ten minutes before his appointed time. At his office door his
eye fell upon the notice. Subconsciously aware that it was
not yet the appointed time for his own return, he took out his
watch, and noted the time. Equally aware that the man whose
name was on the card would return at the announced time, he
methodically paced to the head of the nearby stair, and sat down
to wait for himself.

Here is added another paragraph to the long roll of trouty
capriciousness. This evening the pink-bellied jokers would not
even look at the flies tied with care and pains, though the
whitefish took them eagerly enough, little to the liking of
the fishers, who consequently returned empty handed, never-
theless content with the beauty of the afternoon and evening
in the open.

At evening, in the east, against a middle sky of luminous
pearly green, was a lower sky of iridescent rose clouds on which
were drifts of pale violet. Upon this and rising over its upper
border into the clear green above, were two or three long extending
level-bottomed cumulus clouds, flaming with pale rose and rose
pearl. In the west, the Madison range rose dark against a small
area of brilliant pale lemon. About this, and extending upward
and outward from it hung dark masses of down-dropping storm
clouds, whose lower fringes flamed in burning crimson against the
threatening gray, over a leaden lake, down whose center the

70 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

reflection of the first light lay in a perpendicular path to the very
edge of the near shore.

At sundown Fred returned with a string of saddle and pack
horses, for use on the road to Tepee Basin on Tuesday. By him,
after two days' absence, the camp received the first news of the
progress of the European war since the 17th, and his news was
derived from a Salt Lake newspaper of the 24th which he had seen
while away from camp, this being the 27th.

There were clouds and a slight sprinkle of rain during the
evening, clearing at nine o'clock with a half moon and stars in
the sky, and a variable wind from the north.

NEW EXPERIENCES

Monday the twenty-eighths

"Dot vas your horse, Jim," spoke Fred's voice to the artist,
as, over the post-breakfast smoke, the camp dwellers gathered
to inspect the saddle and pack animals brought in the evening
before, and to have apportioned their respective mounts.

The artist gazed upon an undersized, mild-eyed, black Indian
pony, that grazed unconcernedly near a tall large-boned, blazed
faced weight-carrier, rather suggesting a cavalry horse in aspect^
that obviously was destined for Bill.

"He seems gentle enough," commented the artist.

"Sure," assured Fred. "He vas a children's horse. Dot's
vy I gets him for you. You vas so busy looking at efery dings
van you rides, you don'd haf no time to break no buck-jumper."

Still the artist was not satisfied. He somehow felt it an.
aspersion on his equita-
tory abilities, though he
had not claimed to be
a horseman — that he
should be mounted upon
the smallest bit of horse-
flesh in the bunch.

" Isn't he a bit
small?" he queried.

"Veil, if you spills
off, you don'd haf so far
to fall; und ven you do,
der liddle horse, he stops
und vaits for you to
get on again."

Fred's argument
appeared unanswerable.
Art drew a sedate judi-
cial animal, of leisurely
air and meditative
habits, belonging to Jay, "Saddle up"

Page 71

72 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

that at the artist's instance was promptly dubbed "the old
Roman," equally in allusion to the shape of his nose and his air
of senatorial dignity.

"Think he can carry Art?" asked the artist of Fred.

"You bet. By golly, he carries him all right. Maybe not
fast — he vas not built dot vay, but he carries him. It vas not
kind to ask him for more."

"Saddle up, you two," directed William, "and go up the road
an hour and come back an hour. Jimmy needs hardening to the
saddle for the trip to Tepee, and you need training down."

"But, look here, Fred, where's the bridle?" queried Jim, as,
ready to start, he observed that his beast had, in place of the
accustomed head furnishings, merely a hackamore.

"You don'd need no bridle mit him. Vhen you wants him to
go to der left, you shoost slaps him on der neck mit der rope; und
vhen you wants him to go der other way, you pulls der rope,
not very hard, und he goes. Und if you wants him to get busy
und hump himselluf, you kick him in der ribs, und he goes."

"Humph. He must be pretty well trained. Supposing he
bolts?"

"Veil, I vas shoost telling you you don'd haf to fall far. If
you can't shtop him, you can get off qvick und easy. But you
don'd haf to be afraid of that. He vas well trained. Dot's why
I gets him for you. You vas not all there all der time" — here the
rest of the camp grinned out loud — "you vas looking at things
so hard, und thinking aboudt pictures all der time. Und dot
liddle horse, he knows his business You do vot you likes, und
leaf him alone, und he dakes care of you."

That was conclusive. The artist mounted his equine custo-
dian, and took it for granted that things were all right.

Fifteen minutes on the way, sufficient for the artist to in-
wardly congratulate himself upon the easy lope of his beast, and
the conveniently short distance from his back to the ground in
case of a spill, Art pulled up suddenly, and inquired, indicating
his own, "Don't you think this is a hard-gaited horse?" Before
the ride was half over, one at least of the two cavaliers had reason
to know the evil effects of suddenly and heavily working a set of
long-disused muscles, and his principal anxiety was that he
should not appear to his riding mate ever to have done anything

New Experiences

73

else on earth but sit a horse. If Art suffered the protest of unac-
customed knee and thigh muscles to anything like the extent of
his fellow on the equitatory excursion, then the only conclusion
possible is that he is the champion bluffer of the world.

On the road back, from an excursion over the old wagon road
that wound out of sight round the shoulder of the big hill north-
west of camp, a wagon drawn by a team was encountered. The
governing Jehu, in no wise driving like his scriptural prototype,
elderly and spare, with a sparse chin beard, and weather-shrewd
eyes that blinked within red rims through spectacles mended with

.■/•'■ ..In'"".!! •M,,i.i>-

'■'f'l" ■**••■' '

— .■■»"*k'if>".-'0.*i

'My-'-y^-- i"' '-^ y^

"Round the shoulder of the big hill"

pack thread, sitting askew upon a thin bridged nose, halted to pass
the time of day with the horsemen. In the course of a five-minute
talk to the accompaniment of thoughtful mastication of a liberal
mouthful of plug tobacco, it was learned that the gentleman
guiding the destinies of the team had been in the West some fifty
odd years, was seventy years old, and operated a hay ranch on a
quarter section some distance northwest of Grayling postoffice.

74 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

To the question, "Are you married?" he returned for answer:

**H — 11, no. I 'm waiting till I get old enough."

"Live alone on your ranch?"

"Yes."

The artist queried, "Don't you get lonesome?"

With a gesture that comprehended mountain, lake, and hill-
side in its sweep, the answer came:

"H — 11, no. Too much to look at."

It was sufficient. The cavaliers rode on, the artist feeling
that he had met a kindred spirit.

In their absence the rest of the camp had aired bedding,
blankets, and clothing and made things ready for breaking camp
on the morrow. During the morning there were observed in willow
brush near the camp, large numbers of bobolinks, meadow larks,
and chits, in addition to finches, yellow-hammers, and blackbirds
in flocks, obviously migrating south.

In the afternoon, while the artist sketched. Bill and Art
went to target practice, and after this up the river for duck — the
last trip before breaking camp. After their departure, the artist
took advantage of Jay's temporary freedom from pressing duties
to obtain a little closer acquaintance with Jay Whitman, the
Missourian.

Jay is a strong, kindly soul, very much inclined to take men
and things for what they are, and with a simple, direct familiarity
of manner that nevertheless never trespasses upon the personal
reserve of his interlocutor. The net result of the talk may be
better given in this quotation from a letter written by the artist
to his wife:

"Let those who will lament the decay of polite conversation —
those who think the only things worth talking about are books,
art, music, and the cult of culture generally. To h — 11 with them.
Let them but sit down with open mind and respectful address to
a man such as Jay Whitman, and, if they have intelligence enough,
exchange with him familiar talk of those things that to him are the
main things of life; the cutting and curing of prairie hay, its baling
and marketing ; plowing and seeding for timothy ; the self denials
and hardships attendant on the filing and proving up on three hun-
dred and twenty acres of government land — which he now owns —
the breeding and grading of cattle and its current price on the hoof;

New Experiences 75

the handling and care of horses; farm machinery; the difference
in climate of different parts of Idaho and Montana; his occasional
v/ork as a guide, which helps out with the hay ranch and furnishes
vacation as well — it's too high up to grow much else; the price of
hay and its variation ; and from all this they will gather a tale of
human interest, and a vivid picturing of the necessities and needs
of human life in the great West, impossible to realize when one
talks only of the cultured frills of life.

" I haven't opened a book or felt any inclination to read since
I have been here. The man who can't think a thought or two for
himself in this soul-inspiring environment surely has a bum bean."

The hunters returned after sundown with some mallards,
followed a few minutes later by Fred, leading a forsaken looking
and melancholy wreck of a horse, destined for bear bait at the
new camp. With a clear sunset, after a warm and cloudless day,
the evening was given over to packing for departure ; and bedtime
came with a moon a fortnight old in the sky in conjunction with
the evening star, and a cloudless and frosty night, with the wind
from the southeast.

HITTING THE TRAIL

Tuesday the twenty-ninth.

This was the great day. "You first, Jim," the colonel's
voice commanded, in the sleeping tent at daybreak. "You hit
the hay first last night." A frosty morning, a clear sun moving
through barred clouds, and a gentle wind from the southwest
promised a splendid day for the trip at hand. The artist, medi-
tative at breakfast, the matutinal cigarette thoughtfully poised
in his fingers, received yet another reminder of the urgency of
the day's business. "Start to eating. We've got to knock this
tent down pretty soon."

Promptly after breakfast camp impedimenta was brought

forth from the tents, per-
sonal belongings packed,
bedding rolled and tents
struck. In rolling a pack
of bedding William showed
himself an adept, distribut-
ing folds and thicknesses of
material, wrapping, rolling,
and cording it away with a
mastery and finished crafts-
manship that betrayed the
man of many pack trails.
In the course of forming
one masterly pack, he took
occasion to emphasize to
the artist the importance
of laying blankets with the
folds alternate, in order to
produce an even roll, otherwise they would, rolling on the
folds, produce a "conical cone." Pack and saddle animals were
brought up and saddled, slickers tied, rifle scabbards hitched to
saddle bows, and leaving the guides, with an extra packer
who came into camp the night before, to attend to the busi-
ness of loading the camp kit on the pack animals, and the heavy

Last dispatches

Page 76

Hitting the Trail

77

Art writes home

\.K

impedimenta on the wagon,

to be taken to Grayling

postoffice, William, Art, and

the artist mounted and took

a leisurely way to Grayling

postoffice. Here, with the

matter-of-course hospitality

of the West, they joined the

company there, some seven

in number, at the mid-day

dinner. The dinner, with

its distinctive "home"

quality, derived from the

deft hands and culinary taste

of the postmistress, formed

an epicureanly relished con-
trast to the camp fare of the preceding fortnight.

Immediately on the conclusion of this the pack train ap-
peared in sight at the mouth of the canyon that taced the

messtent door, a
long mile away
from the camp
just left. And
now the march
began in earnest,
through a pleas-
ant meadow of
wild hay, oh
either side of
which the hills of
Red canyon rose
steeply to fir
crowned heights,
with great bas-
tions of bare rock,
often in vertical
strata, showing
between them.
Trying mounts A grove of aspen

7S

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

"'^iri?!

The aspen groves

interspersed with the ad-
vance guard of the firs, was
passed, and the trail began
to rise, through a succession
of pleasant rolling meadows
cut by trilling streams, in
ivhich stood, low descending from the clothed hillsides, noble
clumps of pine and red fir. Grouse and pheasant three or four
times got up and streamed away before the two advance riders.
Jay and Jim, behind whom followed the cavalcade of half a dozen
pack horses, and the four remaining cavaliers who completed the
party. The trail narrowed, the timber pressed more closely,
the ascent became more abrupt, broken by descents into
various ravines water-bottomed.

At an angle of the trail, the party passed close under the
vertical side of a precipitous outcrop from the mountainside
whose sheer face rose a hundred feet or more, and, turning the
corner, followed the trail down an abrupt descent of something
more than a sixty degree pitch. Across a mud-bottomed torrent
at its bottom, the trail turned sharply around the base, and
under the overhanging side of a single mass of rock about the
size of a Chicago business block, fallen from the heights far above,
that, resting with its strata inclined upward, lay in the spot where
the stream's former bed had been. A little beyond this point,
looking back from a clear knoll, the Madison basin just left

Hitting the Trail

79

was observed to widen and deepen
to the southwest horizon. Up and
up, through heavy timber, with many
descents into, and ascents out of
innumerable ravines the party at last

Tightening up a pack

^^.^Stp-Tir^sx^ .

came to an ascent where the entire troop, to ease their horses,
dismounted and went up on foot, to the accompaniment of
some panting and jesting at their own weakness by the most
short-winded climbers. A clump or two of asters still in bloom
were noted in sheltered places, though between the trees, on the
other side of the depths that lay upon the right hand, snow,
left from the storm of ten days since, was still lying.

Open hay meadows, fringed with rising heights, dotted with
the noble clumps of the nut pine — to the artist's eye one of the
most strongly graceful and beautiful of trees — succeeded, always
on a gentle upward slope.

About rose the hills in the golden glow of a slanting sun,
below descended the blue depths; and so lost was the artist in
his eager contemplation of the beauty about him that it was
well for him that, foreseeing his absent-minded weakness, he had
been provided with a surefooted and wiseheaded pony.

Here the colonel, riding fifty yards to the right of the north-
ward-tending trail beckoned the artist. The painter man came
to the edge of the ridge, and looked. He could not but swing
his hat and cheer. Below, blue deeps stretched below deeps to
a distant vista of the Madison river basin, whose willow-bordered
stream wound as a ribbon of silver through the golden plain,
hazily lovely in the diffused light of the afternoon sun. In the
far southern horizon floated a noble height of before unseen
mountains, luminously blue against a pearl sky. Across the
6

80

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

. ")

On the Divide

canyon the fir crowned heights opened to a vista of valleys be-
yond valleys that terminated in a rose-pearl haze through which
showed the snow-marked blue heights which marked the Teton
range, eighty miles away.

A little further and the leading pair of pack animals, with
Jay Whitman riding ahead on the trail, crossing a hay meadow,
suddenly cut sharp against the sky, with beyond them the Mount
Holmes chain in Yellowstone Park, on the other side of a valley
as yet unseen. This was the divide, the apex of things. Now
came the descent into Tepee basin. Down, down, down, on a
trail that twisted, turned and doubled through close set timber
and bush, with fallen trees at all angles and in numbers uncount-
able. At last, from the crest of a succession of rolling hills, which
fell abruptly on one side down into the valley. Tepee creek was
seen half hidden in a close thicket of scrub willow. On its other
side was a slight footing of open ground, above which rose fir
clothed heights against the north.

To the left, at the western end of the valley, rose a splen-
didly dominating triangular pile. Old Baldy — a true peak —
massively and proudly upstanding, lifting its crest into the sky
with an abrupt mastery of the surrounding ranges that pro-
claimed it an aristocrat of the hills. On the plateau, on the
further side of the stream, in a sheltering angle of the firs, at
the base of the mountain that closed the northern side of the
valley lay Camp Tepee, which had been built two years ago by
William and two of his Chicago friends, i.e. E. B. Ellicott and
W. A. Jackson. Long, low, log built, with generously projecting
eaves, and the square pile of the newly added chimney at the
further end speaking of the welcoming hearth within, every

Hitting the Trail

81

projecting log end beside spoke the welcome of a camp set
apart for the fellowship of the open spaces.

The colonel dismounted, and inspected the smashed
door and window contiguous, whose glass and woodwork
lay scattered on the floor within. "Bear" he pro-
nounced briefly, indicating the tell-tale smudge
of a mailed and muddy paw upon the door.

After the unslinging of packs and dump-
ing of impedimenta upon the broad veran-
dah, sheltered by the gable eave, wood was
mustered, the initial match was struck, and
the christening blaze started upon the
hearth of the new fireplace. Round

Camp Tepee

arched, of rough-hewn native stone, its chimney, of hillside boul-
ders bedded in cement, drawing as a chimney should, by its
hospitable glow was illuminated its own testimonial to the crafts-
manship of its architects and builders, Fred Reichenbach and
Jay Whitman. The twelve hundred pounds of cement used in
its construction, to say nothing of tools, some trifles of squared
lumber, and supplies, had all been packed in on horses, twenty-
four miles, from Yellowstone.

82 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

With the strewing of hay in the bunks, the folding of the
blankets, supper, the vespertine card game of the two devotees,
the health of the new camp in a deoch and doris, and a settling
to sleep, with a clear and frost-filled sky without, ended this day.

THE HIGH PLACES

IVednesday) the thirtieth.

In a sunny frosty morning, the camp still in morning
shadow, something to the tolerant amusement of Jay, the
Missouri guide, the artist gave himself the aesthetic pleasure of
a morning toilet in the open, at the fountain of clear and cold
mountain water, carried in a split log conduit, that made its
tinkling plunge among its night-grown icicles fifty feet from the
cabin door. Through the morning, while other members of the
party oiled boots, and were busy with other camp duties,
the artist, three hundred yards down the valley, with his sketch-
ing kit, alternately lifted color, despaired, and prayed the gods
of all beauty as he studied the changing expression of Baldy's
face, and sought to indicate the atmospheric depth and myste-
ries of his attendant regiments of pine and fir.

This afternoon, under guidance of Jay, the colonel. Art and
the artist were taken up the camp's protecting mountainside.
Leaving a difficult trail through the firs, came a succession of
upland parks from which rose noble groups of firs and nut pines.
Next to the stubborn dignity of the nut pine, the thing most
remarked was the splendid spiring symmetry of the fir families,
whose darkly green steeples in ordered irregularity pointed the
soaring slopes over which the party rode.

The beauty of the firs and pines is a constant joy. Where
the hills break into grass-covered slopes and near-levels, as they
do constantly, the firs arrange themselves in beautiful, sym-
metrical groups, a family of smaller trees round about some
towering patriarch from whose seed the circle about him has
sprung. Almost invariably there is within the charmed circle
a little secluded space of grass and wild flowers, and shade-loving
brush and moss, in which the wild birds and wild animals find
harborage.

The nut pine, too is another glorious tree. With a nearly
smooth trunk, branching irregularly with stubborn strength into
a splendid doming mass of foliage, growing always in proud
isolation, it is a veritable king of the high levels.

Page 83

84 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

Jay stopped his horse, looked at the ground beside him,
and pointed down. WilHam rode up, and inspected Hkewise
with interest. The artist and Art, curious, followed suit. Elk
tracks. Constantly through the afternoon were the guide's
eyes upon the ground he traversed. Elk tracks were seen con-
tinuously. Some of them, cautiously allowed the guide, might
have been made the night before. Trees were shown the artist
where the bark had been rubbed clear down to the bare wood,
over a span a foot or two in height. These were where some bull
elk had rubbed his horns. In the height from the ground at
which the rubbing started, and the extent of the abrasion was
possible evidence of the height and spread of horn of the animal
making it. To himself the artist quoted Scott:

"We can show you where he lies
Fleet of foot and tall of size.
We can show the marks he made
When 'gainst the oak his antlers frayed."

Presently, upon a noble height, the party looked down
upon and across a veritable sea of mountains. Yonder was the
Gallatin range. This was Electric Peak. That yonder, in-
dicating a faint blue, silverlaced splendor on the far horizon,
seen between the parting of the clouds, was Emigrant Peak.
To the south, crowning the blue band that girdled the field of
vision, was old Twotop, the mountain the artist had painted at
evening but the other day on Madison river, whose peak marked
the height of the Continental Divide and the parting of the
waters, flowing respectively to the Gulf and the Pacific. Directly
in front, seeming near at hand, but miles away through the
clear air, rose a tremendous hog-back, its top sere and yellow,
with a few dwarf firs and spruces in sheltered spots, its length
to be computed in miles, its sides dropping in torn and jagged
ribs of rock that rose up from titanic slides, emerging from a
forest of fir and pine lost in blue depths that only an eagle's eye
might fathom. Along its crest ran the boundary line of the Gal-
latin Game Preserve, set apart by the State of Montana, the
line continuing along the ridges to the west, and bisecting the
great peak that dominates Tepee valley, Baldy, whose crown
rose another fifteen hundred feet above the ridge, five miles to
the west.

The High Places 85

The point on which the quartette stood, an upstanding spur
of rock whose vertically splintered sides dropped sheer a hundred
feet or more to the point of emergence from a great slide that
quickly lost itself in obscure deeps of fir and pine, was seamed
and torn, with great boulders and lesser fragments of rock hurled
about in a cyclopean disorder. There were no heights above
from which they could have come down. The slow action of
seeping water, and rock splitting frost succeeding, even through
long-drawn hundreds of centuries, might not account for but
an infinitesimal part of the palaeolithic upheaval. With a slight
mental shock one came to a rather awed recognition of the fact that
the party looked upon the remains of the initial battle of forces
— the debris from the very beginning of the world. There is no
word. Thought can only vaguely grope. One can but look at the
rocks everlasting, statant to eternity from the primal disorder —
noting on their faces the golden flame of lichen that may have
caught and sent back the evening glows of a thousand centuries.

With field glasses the sides of the mountain across the
canyon were raked slowly and systematically, every craggy ledge,
every sun-warmed nook being scanned for bighorn — the moun-
tain sheep of the Rockies. Nothing was seen to move, nor could
with any certainty be anything picked out among piles of scat-
tered rock, or in herbaged corners that might be reckoned the
bodies of sheep couchant. For, as Jay explained: "The mountain
sheep matches that pile of rock in color, and unless he stands
clear against the sky, or a patch of herbage, or moves, you might
take your glasses right over him, and not know he was there.
Yes, sir, I reckon he is one of the hardest animals to find there
is going, and the greatest of trophies if you happen to get him."

Evening drawing in, came the descent and return to camp.
The prime descent was made almost at the base of Baldy and
thence down the valley, following the creek. A cloudy gray
sundown and a slight halo around the moon three quarters full
promised rain for the morrow.

As a side-light on the sometimes necessary and economical
discipline of camp life far from a base of supplies, it may be
remarked that the customary coronas handed out by William
after dinner were omitted this evening. "We get 'em only
every other evening now," said he.

THE CONTENT OF QUIET DAYS

Thursday, October the first.

William and Art, under the guidance of Jay and Earl
Counter, the new guide and packer who came into camp on
Monday night, being bent on a try for elk, the camp was early
astir, in spite of heavy fog and a feel of approaching rain in the
air.

At breakfast, Art to the artist spoke thusly: "I want to
apologize to you for reaching across you. I've done it several
times before, and expect to do it again several times more, so I
want this apology to stand for all the time we are in camp."
This comprehensive forestalling of camp life abruptness created
a general laugh.

Rain came during the forenoon and a heavy fog after the
departure of the hunters. Jay and William came back about
1 0 :30 reporting nothing. A good day for a blazing fire and indoor
diversion. Fred's hounds were yawning their heads off. Art
and Counter returned upon noon. Counter reporting having
seen the fore end of a bull and the after end of a cow elk.

A sunny afternoon, and William and Jay down the valley
prospecting for elk, and Fred to set a couple of bear traps, some
distance from camp.

Baldy was more splendid than ever in late afternoon, with
its northeastern side in the shadow, a great flash of sun on its
southern shoulder, cloud shadows lying violet upon its lower
forests, the valley below golden in the haze of Indian summer
barred with the long cast shadows of sentinel pines. A camp
robber (Colorado magpie) with plumage flashing iridescent blue
and violet in the sun, was desperately interested in the artist's
sketch and on the branch of a convenient tree behind him crit-
icised his painting with the utmost freedom.

On sundown, the artist, desirous of riding down the valley,
looking for the black Indian pony he had so far been riding,
put a halter on, took the hobbles from, brought into camp and
saddled up a horse of corresponding color, ridden by Fred, no-
toriously difficult to mount. Under the artist's gentling and

Page £6

The Content of Quiet Days 87

soothing conversation the kicker had submitted like a lamb to
all preliminary operations and was even rubbing his head against
the painter's shoulder as he prepared to mount. At this point,
Fred, who from the verandah, placidly puffing at a piratical
looking and evil-smelling briar that he affected, had been watching
the proceedings with apparent unconcern, interposed:

"Say, hold on there, you've got der wrong horse."

" Is that so?"

"Yes, py golly, that is so, und he might throw you off. If
you wants to ride him — I guess you can — all right — but I don'd
want to be responsible."

"He's been gentle enough with me so far."

"Yes, dot vas all right, but it's when you goes to get on him,
py golly, dot der hell breaks loose — you wants to get on him
quick — und then stay."

The writer is not at all ashamed to admit that knowing his
own inexpertness as a horseman, he accepted the friendly warn-
ing, and desisted from pursuing his mistake in equine identity
to a conclusion that would have been suffered by a meanly prac-
tical joker in silence, for the enjoyment of another's discomfiture.

A word of counsel given by William to the artist just before
turning in is worth noting for the benefit of other city dwellers
who may come into the mountain fastnesses. "Don't go into
the timber without a guide. Stay in the open and in sight of
a mark of camp. Make it a point always to have lots of matches
with you. If you do get lost, build a fire, and stick right by
it. Stay there if you have to stay there a week. The camp
will find you by the smoke."

Friday the seconds

The morning broke rainy and misty. At breakfast Fred
recited the details of a horse deal he tried to make with an Indian.

"Der Indian, he has a pony dot looks good to me. "He
vas a mighty trim liddle pony und I liked him. I think I likes
to puy him. Der Indian wanted me to gif him seventy-five
dollars. I wouldn't gif him but sixty-five. Der Indian, he
shoost grunts und shakes his head. I has some good high-proof
whiskey with me, und I thinks may be it softens him up a liddle

S8 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

if I gifs him der whiskey. He not get very drunk. He only
drinks aboudt a quart und he was not drunk. Und den he asks
me for der pony one hundert und fifty dollars."

The following string of definitions was handed out by Earl
Counter in a talk on horses. Ca^use: an inferior breed of horse
of low grade, the word originally Spanish. Pinto: a spotted horse,
Broncho: an unbroken or wild horse. Mustang: Mexican for an
inferior breed corresponding to the cayuse, running in mesquite
brush. The cow pony is not a distinct breed. "I rode in one
outfit where they had all kinds of horses from cayuses up to
thoroughbreds from imported stallions, and they were all used
as cow ponies. And some of them were mean horses. When
you get a cross-breed between a cayuse and a thoroughbred you
get about the meanest horse going. It's like crossing Indian and
white, all the wisdom of the one and the cunning and the sav-
agery of the other."

The only bird life seen to-day was a large California blue-
jay, darkly indigo in the rain which continued all day. The camp
kept busy within doors, washing towels and underwear,
inspecting arms and such trifling occupations. William and
Jay were out in the morning tracking elk, but saw none. Art
and Counter in the afternoon were also prospecting, and Fred
dieparted to set another bear trap.

A mantel board eight feet long, a foot broad and two inches
thick supported on unbarked fir brackets was placed over the
fireplace by William and Jay. A noble pair of elk horns, on the
original skull, was centered over the mantel, and between the
horns, upon the axe-hewn logs the monogram of the Tepee Hunt-
ing Club was illuminated in bright colors by the artist. A six
sided table, longer than broad, comfortably heavy and solid,
was devised and built by the same artificers from some stray
planks. With an under-beam of a half log, to which three splayed
legs were spiked, two from either end of one side, and one from
the center of the other, the outward spread of each leg, from
the downward pressure of the table top, was taken up and neu-
ralized by a cross-beam on the line of intersection. It rep-
resented a most creditable bit of engineering ingenuity and
carpentry combined.

In the person of Earl Counter, after supper, the plainsman

The Content of Quiet Days

89

The interior of Camp Tepee

showed himself a keen and acute critic of current magazine fiction
deaUng with range hfe. The point of his criticism was directed
most forcibly against the idiom and slang put into the mouths
of his cattlemen by the author of "Wolfville Days." Cowmen,
vide Counter, did not habitually use slang in that reckless and
superfluous way. In fact, their speech, even allowing for the
peculiar nomenclature of their calling, was far freer from per-
versions of the language than was that of most city dwellers.
It was not an uncommon thing to find men of education riding
the ranges, but even outside of these the typical rangeman would
be, to the "atmosphere-seeking" romance hunter, fed on mag-
azine dope, disappointingly restrained, not to say simple in his
speech.

Mr. Counter, born in Kansas, "raised" in Montana, on the
range all his life, and Mr. Jay Whitman, born in Missouri, in
the West since 1881, equally a rangeman, may, it is assumed, be
taken as fairly typical examples of cattleman and ranchman

90

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

respectively. In their
speech, save for a few eUsions
and neutrahzed negatives,
occurs less of slang and
fewer perversions than are
noticeable among many pre-
sumably cultured city dwell-
ers. Of the peculiar slang
of their calling, the magazine-
bred range idiom and phras-
ing, there is none. In fact
their language is almost
classic in its directness and
simplicity, and except to a
grammatical pragmatist, as
pure as it well can be.

To the artist, playing
solitaire, comes William:
"Oh, Jim, when is a wolf
not a — here, wait a minute." Business of cogitation by William
and from the artist —

"Now, now, William, easy; take your time; get that straight,
now."

"Oh, ah, I have it. When is a wolf a fox?"
The artist reflects deeply: "I give it up. When is a wolf a
fox, Mr. Bones?"

"When he won't be trapped," responds William.
The house grins, and William with the successful joke-
makers' just pride, elucidates: "I was suggesting to Fred just
now that a wolf might be trapped and Fred said, 'You can't do
it. He is too foxy,' and it came to me just like that." Of such
trifles are laughter and diversion in camp made.

With a rainy and threatening night outside, a blazing fire,
and two card games within, this day ends.

'Earl"

Saturday the third.

A fresh snow and the camp astir at daybreak in expectation
of easy tracking at their elk hunting. Counter and Art departed

The Content of Quiet Days 91

down the valley, and Jay and William up the hill, southeast
and north of camp respectively.

Both parties returned in mid-afternoon. Counter and Arthur
reported having trailed a pair of fine bull elks for an hour. As
they did not stop to feed, and were gaining all the time, the
chase was finally abandoned, it being useless to expect to catch
up with them before nightfall. Jay and William struck a fresh
track and got within sight and range, but the bull was in close
timber where it was impossible to get a clear sight. He started
traveling at speed through the timber, and of course could not
be followed with the hope of again getting in range after having
been once jumped.

Fred went down to Grayling with a pack horse in the after-
noon, for mail and supplies. A heavy, wet snow fell all day.
About nine in the evening the snow cleared and a struggling moon
showed. With cards, cheerful talk, and a hope of fair weather
on the morrow the day concludes.

MAINLY OF ELK

Sunday the fourths

A half clear dawn with the hillsides shrouded in heavy
clouds, four inches of snow on the level, and snow again at half-
past eight.

Jay and Bill, Art and Earl saddled up. The first two
started in spite of heavy snowfall. Art made a bluff at going
but concluded that the fireside was a very good place. He
stayed there. The artist didn't even make a bluff at going out,
but set up a canvas and got busy with a composition of the valley
and Mount Baldy in late afternoon light.

Fred arrived from Grayling with the mail and Chicago
newspapers, the latest of them seven days old. William and
Jay came back shortly before noon, after an eight-mile ride,
reporting very heavy snow and high wind on the higher levels
where they had been hunting, and no sign of recently moving
elk except one track crossed on the way home about three-quarters
of a mile back from camp at the foot of the ridge. This track they
said was comparatively fresh, and was that of a young bull or cow.

After dinner the snow continued. Art and Earl decided
they would go out for a while and take up the fresh track of the
young bull mentioned by Jay and William. About four o'clock
they returned, carrying the liver of the animal. Art had had his
first shot at an elk. It proved to be a fine piece of meat, a young
spike bull, 18 to 20 months old, with his spikes which were about
fourteen inches long still in the velvet, which condition at this
time of year it seems is rare. Earl reported that they had fol-
lowed him only about a mile and a half when they found him
leisurely feeding on some willows at the edge of a spruce thicket,
and Art had brought him down with a shoulder shot at about
eighty yards, a second shot at closer range breaking the spinal
column just back of the head. A royal supper and a congenial
evening followed.

This day William took another bath on a rubber sheet
spread on the cabin floor before the fireplace. A fire's a com-
fortable thing anyway, with seven inches of snow on the level
outside and perhaps more to come.

Page 92

Mainly of Elk 93

Monday the fifths

Snowing at daybreak, a bluff at clearing up shortly before
noon, and again snowing for the rest of the day, with twelve inches
on the level and the Camp Tepee bungalow fringed with icicles
from eaves to the ground, some over six feet long, is the weather
record for this day.

The hobbled horses, grazing loose, are unable to rustle suffi-
cient feed through the snow. A pronouncement is made by the
colonel of the camp that unless the storm breaks and clears, the
camp must break, and move on the morrow to lower levels where
the horses can get feed.

Jay and Counter went into the woods to dismember and bring
in the meat of yesterday's kill. In respect of elk horns Counter
handed out a rather interesting bit of information, viz. that in the
second year the young bull elk gets his first branches — the brow
spires, and thereafter an additional spire up to the fourth or fifth
year, after which the number of spires may vary; it having come
within his knowledge that a six-year-old bull carried only five
branches and cases having been reported to him of older bulls
having a still less number of branches. It is Counter's opinion
that the character of the winter may have effect upon the number
of branches, reasoning by analogy from the case of domestic cattle.
Herefords and Durhams for instance, according to him, when
corralled, sheltered and full fed in winter, develop small horns, but
turned loose on the range with only such food as they can pick up,
develop large and long horns. Counter disputes the avowal of
Mr. Roosevelt that the prairie antelope, as do the deer kind
generally, sheds its horns, inasmuch as he has never seen prairie
antelope with new horns in the velvet, or bare of horns, nor has
he ever seen a shed antelope horn.

With a sketch of the interior of the camp by the artist, the
mending of hobbles and pack ropes by the guides, cards, the
savoring of elk meat for dinner, and a good deal of pleasant talk,
this day within doors passes swiftly to its end, with snow still
falling.

GOOD-BYE. CAMP TEPEE

Tuesday the sixth.

This morning there came a temporary cessation of the snow,
but the sky is heavily overcast. There were elk meat and hot corn
cakes for breakfast.

There is something between twenty and twenty-four inches of
snow on the level, the wind from the west, what there is perceptible
by the drift of clouds, the temperature a bit below freezing ; and it's
a question of getting out to-day, and saving the horses, or remaining
on a chance of a break and clear, and starving the horses, and
risking still greater difficulty in getting out.

The pack and saddle horses got no feed yesterday and there
being a limited supply of oats in camp, the horse wranglers are
drawing poker hands on the kitchen table to see which saddle
horses get the last feed of oats before starting. The starved pack
horses were given the hay which had been used in the camp beds.

Oranges are handed out by William, who advised us thusly:
"Put the peel in your pocket to chew on going down." A little
earlier he had advised the artist, busy before a mirror, that it
wasn't an absolute necessity for him to shave, he might be a bit
more comfortable without, since, as spoken a trifle later "This is
the morning we make the dash for the pole." It was apparent to
all that William was most reluctant to leave camp and descend
to the lower levels. It meant the abandonment of a two or three-
day trip on Old Baldy and the adjoining ridges, planned by himself
and Jay, for bighorn, but there was now at least three feet of snow on
Old Baldy and no grass for the horses. William was observed to
put his nightcap in his pocket, and the artist likewise, for, as
William explained: "It will be a mighty comfortable thing to tie
around your ears if there's any wind going over those snow slopes
on the way down.

The business of packing and saddling succeeded. The tying
of a pack, it is almost a commonplace to observe, is an art by
itself, attained in its perfection only after numberless trials, and
comprehending within its purview a variety of knots, hitches and
throws, almost as many in number as those a seaman is supposed
to master. The points aimed for by the packer, as gathered by

Page 94

Good-Bye, Camp Tepee ^

the observing scribe, are balanced distribution of weight upon the
animal's back, and such a securing of the pack with the packline
that every unexpected stress and strain caused by motion upon an
uneven and steep trail, is taken up in every direction, each part of
the line stressing upon every other part in such a way as to keep all
taut. As a minor incident of the entire business is to be noted
again, William's peculiarly workmanlike mode of forming a close,
compact, and solid bedding roll, enclosing rifles and other such
impedimenta awkward to stow of themselves. The pack bags,
oblong floored, high sided canvas bags reinforced at the corners
and lips with leather, with projecting iron rings for the passage of
the packline, and holding provisions, kitchen utensils, and like
small items, are to be noted as a necessary part of pack-traveling
equipment.

A hasty lunch, the final securing of provisions left behind from
roof rafters, beyond the reach of small wild animals that might
gain entry, and the dousing of the fire, and the march commenced.
Crossing the creek, the artist waved a farewell to Mount Baldy,
brilliantly white in the sun against drifting clouds, and fell there-
after to observing the flashing hues of refracted light from melted
snowdrops on the hindquarters of the pack horse immediately
before him. Through the snow the pack animals plunged and
tango stepped, following the colonel of the camp and Jay, breaking
trail. The snow slopes, blinding in sunny brilliance, showed in
sharp cut shadow the plodding forms of the pack train. Heavily
snow-weighted fir trees beside the trail bent over into fantastic
suggestions of white hooded, mysterious figures. Sometimes a
quaint grotesque, causing an inward smile was encountered.
Advancing to a rise, William turned in his saddle and waved a
hand to the artist to make sure of his seeing a noble group of firs,
sculpturesquely draped in alban purity, that dominated the
eminence. Jay was observed to check his horse and look down
upon his right. The artist did so likewise on reaching the same
point, and for some further distance meditated upon the curious
recognitory thrill that comes to one identifying for the first time
the trail of the bull elk in the snow. Presently, in the woods, up
and down the slopes, occasional small avalanches of powdered
snow descended from branches overhead, barely poised, needing
but the passage of a pack horse to disturb them. One noted again

96 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

the white silence of the forested, heights. It was not threatening,
not fearful; rather it conveyed a sense of utter impassivity, the
self -con tainedness of the wilds.

None of the great upland plateaus nor notable descents of
the trip in were encountered and the artist quickly recognized
that the party was going out by a new trail, and presently began
to pick up a succession of blazes on the tree trunks; and to enter-
tain himself by the endeavor to pick the trail as far ahead as
possible by blazes alone. Though it is to be noted with em-
phasis, that picking up blazes, comfortably saddled on the back
of a smart and quiet Indian pony treading with assurance in
the trail made by a preceding train is a vastly different business
from that of identifying blazes on a trail traveled de novo. Elk
tracks were frequent, crossing the trail repeatedly. Weazel and
marten trails also were noted, twisting and winding on them-
selves in characteristic fashion.

Two hours out from Camp Tepee, a party of three was en-
countered, equipped for elk hunting, but really on the more
serious business of searching for the father of the man encoun-
tered fishing above the Madison river camp some days pre-
viously, who had gone after elk, and had been lost since Sunday.
As detailed by William later in the evening, though better things
were strenuously hoped for, the chances were, that overcome
by terror of being lost, the unfortunate had lost his head, and,
instead of building a fire, and waiting to be found, had, with
the deadly fear that sometimes overmasters those lost in the
woods, kept on traveling, searching for shelter, and by that
rendering much more difficult the task of those searching
for him.

Some hour and a half before sunset, debouching upon the
easier slopes, the windings of the north fork of the Madison
were recognized amid the snow-covered plain. The surrounding
hills, Twotop notably, and later. Coffin Mountain, had been
hailed sometime previously. And along a bit of road, across
a rise; and with some skirmishing by Jay and Fred to round
up rebellious pack animals at a fence corner, the party came
to the Oliver Johnson ranch. In the dooryard was an elk calf,
curious, standoffish in manner, and with a thick pelt that spoke
eloquently of the youngster's provision for the winter.

Good-Bye, Camp Tepee 97

Received by Mrs. Johnson, a handsome, clear skinned woman,
fair haired, of height and presence, and a genially fine manner,
and by her sister-in-law, Mrs. Gladstone, whose Scheherazade-
like head-dress gave a piquantly oriental touch to her own Saxon
good looks, the party settled comfortably down for the evening
by a box stove, between two windows, one commanding the
south and east, the other the west.

A winter sunset came, flaming in orange gold, clear gold
and green gold in succession beneath the overhead gray, rose-
shot clouds, the snow sheeted valley and low hills bounding it
lying under it in pale violet, the mountains closing the horizon
in deep blue violet, with still deeper bands where the fir forests
crowned the near foothills. Just beneath the windows, a bend
of the nearby creek, spreading broad in the violet snow, flamed
to the evening sky like a spread jewel. From one window to the
other the artist walked, neglecting his supper, his fellows at the
table kindly tolerant of his little peculiarity, and interested in
his hurried sketching.

A solidly bound quarto Shakespeare, in good workmanlike
calf, its pages thumbed, lay upon a table and amid a medley of
other books were noted a well bound set of Dumas, a novel or
two by E. P. Roe, a sea story of Clark Russell's, Scott's St. Ronan's
Well, Ebers' Uarda, and some odd volumes of Stevenson and
Byron. Best sellers were not. A couple of fine bearskins on
the walls, the interspaces occupied by plates from Life, some
calendar pictures, and a miscellany of valentines, postcards,
Christmas cards, and photographs in groups gave evidence of
the native hunger for the expression of beauty in some form.
To this a gramophone on a table in one corner whose first record
roll, picked up at random, was titled "Mayflower Polka" also
testified, together with geranium slips rooting strongly in tomato
cans in the south window.

Presently arrived Mr. Johnson, a bearded fair man of middle
height, compactly built, with the brow and eyes of a student
and poet, coupled with the reserved resource of the plainsman.
His local soubriquet, "Snowshoe" Johnson, is derived from
his having been the champion ski-runner and snowshoe walker
of the district for successive winters.

Some mail arrived from the Grayling postoflice a mile west.

98 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

And with thankful weariness the travelers went to bed, on real
mattresses, and between sheets, William choosing the artist for
a bunk-mate, on the ground of his being a quiet sleeper.

THREE QUIET DAYS

Wednesday the seventh.

At breakfast this morning the artist commented to Mr.
Johnson on the excellence of the Shakespeare he had handled the
evening before, and found he had touched a match to a mine.
Comment, quotation and counter quotation, appreciation of
characters, and anecdotes of great players were exchanged from
the ends of the table, with a reciprocal pleasure and something
to the tolerant amusement of those who listened to the Shake-
speare fans' diversion.

On this bleak hillside lives this man, face to face each day
with the stern necessity of merely living, on ground so high that
little save prairie hay may be raised during a growing season
a little over eight weeks
long; hardened with toil and
exposure to weather whose
grim bitterness in winter
can be but faintly imagined
by the city dweller in a
heated flat ; remote from any
town — his nearest railway
point thirteen miles away —
and a train there during
seven months of the year
only; his neighbors, a mile
on either side, too engrossed,
as himself, with the daily
work of living to have time
or inclination for the cultiva-
tion of a kindred taste.
In this mental and physical
isolation, amid the hardships
and unending daily toil of
the pioneer ranchman, he
has found opportunity to make himself a scholar of the great
dramatist, whose direct and familiar acquaintance with and

"Snowshoe" Johnson

Page 99

100 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

appreciation of his finenesses might shame many a professor
of literature.

Fred, detailed by the colonel, was away early into the
hills through which we came yesterday, to aid in the search
for the missing man. Jay and William followed, intent on
both man and elk hunting, as also Art and Counter still
later.

This was a gloriously clear day, warm at mid-day, the hill-
side clay under the sun and melting snow, which at this lower
level was not more than three inches deep, developing a quality
of slip and slide of the nth degree of lubricity. Though he would
rather have been without doors the artist bound himself to his
conceived duty, that of record of the sunset splendor, quietly
glowing in gold over a violet snow plain, observed the evening
before.

The evening of this day was no less splendid, and the play
of rose light on the shoulders and bosses of the hills to the south-
east, their hollows toned with pure cobalt, under a goldenly
green sky, on whose lower border piled low, rose-glowing cumulus
clouds, beneath long streamers of violet-gray cirrus, was unspeak-
ably beautiful, viewed from the hillside above the house. The
band of distant firs next succeeding the hills toward the fore-
ground, showed in the evening light a deep greenish blue. Next
them lay a broad strip of sage, luminously green gray, almost
as the sky, but of a deeper tone. Then came a broad band of
willow bush marking the course of the hidden stream, deep red
violet, with a hint of orange here and there. Immediately be-
low lay a patch of snow-covered prairie, pale orange gold in the
last sun, with the long-lying shadows of a near haystack clear
violet upon it, changing as the sun left it to pale blue violet,
as the rose light mentioned came upon the hills far beyond. In
the extreme east, lay a low, long bank of cumulus clouds in rose
and violet, and in the west, floating bars of brilliant gold in a
green-gold sky above the violet blue bulk of the mountains made
one to feel the futility of words.

A boulder upon the hillside, its sides embroidered with the
lichen that had wrought its slow patterning a thousand centuries
before man ever set foot in this valley — in looking upon it, its
sides riven with the slow process of summer heat, fall rain and

Three Quiet Days 101

winter frost through a lapse of time that baffled one's attempt
to grasp: what was it but a document of the very beginning of
things, that made man's pride in his history-recorded antiquities
a fooHsh and a childish thing.

Just after sundown a blue heron settled in the creek a hun-
dred yards from the house door. Through field glasses he was
observed to lay his head sideways to the water, well below his
shoulders. After half a minute he struck, sideways, his head
traveling to the water on a slight incline, almost horizontally.
Four times he was observed to strike, and not once with a direct
up and down blow, always sideways, from an almost horizontal
position of the head just above the water.

At sundown Art and Counter returned reporting no luck.
Shortly after came William and Jay. William had had the
felicity to observe a band of cow elks and calves, clear against
the sky upon a high ridge, for some minutes ; a pretty sight, and
one that stirred his innate love of animals to the utmost. They
had found any number of bull tracks, but, desirous of obtaining
an extra large head, had chosen only the very largest, and had
made a long and difficult trail, confident of obtaining the boss
elk head of the range. Suddenly to their disgust the trail went
clear between a couple of young firs, barely three feet apart,
and their barks were unscratched. No animal with a spread
of horns worth bothering about was going through that gap,
for all the size of his feet. So there the chase was aban-
doned.

After dark arrived Fred, from a long day's search for the
missing man. Fred had found his trail, some thirty-six hours
old — as nearly as could be judged, this side of Tepee. He had
lain down, and had his gun with him, for the print of it was ob-
served in the snow where he had rested. He was chewing to-
bacco— had built no fire, which argued he had no matches, and
was taking short steps, which indicated exhaustion. The ap-
proach of darkness put an end to the search to be taken up
again on the morrow.

Newspapers and mail were brought in from Grayling post-
office by Mr. Johnson — the newest Chicago paper a week old —
and from Salt Lake City three days old. Everybody went to
bed early, with the weather clouding up outside.

102 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

Thursday the eighth.

Fred was away early into the hills to the north to again take
up the search for the missing man. William and Jay followed
him shortly, still intent on elk.

During the forenoon, the carcass of a large cow elk was
brought in by "Snowshoe," and butchered for the winter
meat supply. It appears that the salting and drying of elk
meat for this purpose is a regular practice of many ranchers in
this part of the country.

There was a semi-clear sky at sundown, with a lovely pile
of cumulus clouds on the southern horizon, and a great deal of
snow gone from the warmth of mid-day, a prospect of cloud and
perhaps snow on the morrow.

Some hours after supper William and Jay came in, having
ridden and trailed about thirty miles in the day, on a tremen-
dous track, which darkness compelled them to abandon within
a mile of our Tepee camp, as the animal was traveling, not
stopping to feed. Any number of minor chances presented
themselves, but as William expressed it: "I don't want to kill
another bull, merely for the sake of killing him: but only if he has
a bigger head than the one I have." Fred met them at the cabin
just as they left, with no news of the missing man, and proposing
to stay there all night.

This evening the gathering at the Johnson ranch received a
notable addition in the person of Mr. Benjamin Franklin Frohman,
of Dillon, Montana, specifically, and of the West in general since
1864, in which year he crossed the plains in an emigrant train of
sixty-six wagons. A man of height, weight and presence ; with a
faintly grizzling brown beard and mustache, a heavy shock of
still black hair gives the lie to his confessed sixty-seven years.
"Ben" as by now he is familiarly called by all the party, is a living
witness to the health and youth conserving power of an active
life without-doors in the West. An Indian fighter of repute,
claiming thirty-seven scalps, and hoping to get a few more before
he quits, his point of view toward the primitive people of the plains
is essentially that of a man personally witness to acts of cold-
blooded treachery and cruelty on their part to those who had bene-
fitted them, and who has himself been compelled to defense against
attack unprovoked. To such a man the larger ethical aspects of

Three Quiet Days

103

the case, the probability that the Indian, offended by one white
man, childUke, thereafter conceives all whites his natural enemy,
and his quite human resentment of the usurpation of his hunting
grounds by a strange people, do not exist. By his own account,
scout and fighter in several Indian wars, witness of every refine-
ment of aboriginal cruelty,
Mr. Frohman was emphatic
in confirmation of the old
aphorism of the plains, that
"the only good Injun is a
dead one," and to him the
slaughter of an Indian was of
less consequence than the kill-
ing of a partridge. Passing
over the stated inference,
drawn from his own remarks,
that the Indian was not to
be considered a human being
at all, Mr. Frohman frankly
could not account for the
fact that the Canadian Gov-
ernment had had no such
trouble with its Indians as
had the United States, and
that the history of settlement
in the Canadian west showed
no such record of massacres

and uprisings as did the western states. To the statement that
entire communities in Canada were of Indian nationality, farming,
operating factories, electing town officers and voting at parlia-
mentary elections, taking the responsibility of citizenship as fully
as their white neighbors, he responded: "There must have been
some white blood in them."

Mr. Frohman, with a companion, a dentist with a taste for
hunting, had just come down from the hills with his winter supply
of elk meat, the hindquarters of one carcass in which weighed two
hundred and fifty pounds, and the forequarters thickly lined with
the whitest and purest fat, hard and firm. "Just over the first
joint above the knee, and three inches forward, and you'll get
8

''Ben''

f04 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

the heart of an elk every time" was his statement of the aiming
point for the elk hunter. He was proud to say that hunter
though he was, he had never killed merely for the sports* sake.
He had never wasted a pound of meat — fish, flesh, or fowl.

"Why, one time I killed as many as sixteen elk in one day up
in the hills here; but I used every one of them. I sold four hundred
and eighty dollars worth that season at from seventeen to twenty-
five cents a pound, and the rest I shipped to friends in want of meat.

"No, you can't tell anything about an elk's age from the
spikes on his horns after the fourth or fifth year. I've known an
elk in captivity over twenty-five years that had not more than six
spikes on his horns.

"Prairie antelope? I've seen as many as from fifteen hundred
to two thousand in a bunch, but I doubt now if you would see more
than five in a bunch. They are getting scarce. Yes, some of them
may have been killed wastefully, but I reckon the settlement of the
country drove them up into the hills, and as the antelope is a
prairie animal, in the deep snow of the timber, they can't get food
freely, and of course a great many must have been starved out.
They shed the outer covering of the horns, but the bony core is
permanent."

Handing out a couple of small soft-nosed shells, he com-
mented: "Thirty-five — thirty-five. The old large caliber rifles
are mostly on the scrapheap. I shot that cow to-day withthissmall
gun. The bullet where it entered made a hole you couldn't see,
but it struck a bone, and mushroomed, and where it came out you
could put your three fingers in. She didn't go further than from
here to the door before she laid down. And now they tell me
there's a twenty-two that shoots a mile. Good at a thousand
yards, they say. I hear a lot of sportsmen talking about these long
range high power rifles. But back here in Idaho, in the last
twenty-five years, I've seen more deer killed at a hundred yards
and under than over — three times as many more. My own gun
is safe up to four hundred yards — I'm certain of it up to that range.
And I don't ever have occasion to use it that far. That cow I
killed to-day was got at thirty-five paces. I counted 'em when I
went over — just a hundred and five feet I made it, or a little under.
No, you don't usually get a sight in timber much over a hundred
yards, though you may of course get a long shot at one clear on

Three Quiet Days 105

the sky line, on a hill or something like that, but that don't come
often enough to cut any ice."

Friday the ninth.

In spite of light snow following a rose and gray sunrise, William
and Jay, optimistic and persistent, were again away at the morn-
ing's earliest infancy, still intent upon the big head. Art and
Counter also. Art cheerfully and contagiously hopeful, shortly
followed them on the same quest.

Shortly before sundown the quartette returned, with a
report of ' ' nothing doing. ' ' Later in the evening William expressed
his conviction, contemplating his score against Arthur in their
sempiternal amusement, that the chief reason for his being unlucky
in the hunt for the big head lay in his particularly good luck at
cards. As two bodies could not occupy the same position in space
at one time, by analogous reasoning it clearly followed that a man
could not expect to be lucky in two things at the one time. A
philosophic piece of comfort.

From Peter Kerzenmacher at Grayling in the late afternoon it
was learned that the missing man had been found this morning,
living, but in a state of utter exhaustion, and delirious, something
like forty miles from the point where he was missed. He was
being cared for under shelter, and would be brought into camp at
Grayling to-morrow.*

Mr. Ben Frohman this evening made some comments on
gambling, speaking from the standpoint of one who had run a
gambling game for twenty-five years.

" I think gambling should be legalized and open. If it's open,
it's got to be on the square, which it just naturally can't be behind
closed doors. Now they's a law prohibiting gambling but here
they let these horse races, poolrooms and bucket shops go right
along, and they're worse, for on a horse race a man ain't got a
chance in the world to win — they's so many ways of fixing a horse ;
but on a square gambling game he anyway gets an even break for
his money. Yes sir, 1 reckon 1 would rather take a chance on a
faro game or a dog fight than on a horse race. If I ever bet on a

*It was later learned that this was a false report. Up to the time the party left the Johnson ranch,
no trace whatever had been found of the missing man, and as the snow was deep in the hills and more coming,
it was not likely that any trace would be found, if at all, till spring. The writer is informed that this is the
third inan lost in three successive years in the same section, which fact gives a strong emphasis to the caution
given him by William in an earlier chapter.

106 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

horse race, it'll be on my own horse, and he'll run for blood. No,
I don't recognize that there's any moral principle at all involved in a
gamble. If I've got a hundred dollars, and you've got a hundred
dollars, and I like to put my hundred against yours that I kin play
a game better'n you can, I reckon that ain't any one else's business
but ours. Yes, I think gambling should be made legal for anyone
who wants to buck the game and can afford it. They's a lot of rich
men around that don't know anything else to do with their money,
and it gets a lot of money in circulation that otherways would never
move. The man who has a family dependent on him and who
can't aflFord to, and for their sakes shouldn't gamble, should be
punished. The single man who ain't responsible to no one but
himself, he should be permitted, and when he's broke, let him go to
work again.

" I ain't been in a church for thirty years, and then I was pall
bearer at the funeral of a friend who had a misunderstanding with
a deputy sheriff. There was a church started in Dillon long before
that, and the hat was passed for contributions for the building,
and they came to me and the other game keepers, and we all put
up — and we wasn't mean about it. When the church was finished
and the preacher started business — Methodist it was — my wife
wanted to go one night, and I went with her. And there was a
lot of the other men that with me had put up for it in there too.
And the preacher preached straight at us as gamblers and publicans,
and damned us so far into hell we have never got out of it, and
after he'd taken our money too. Now, wasn't that enough to
make any man quit?"

"Look here, Ben" the artist wanted to know; "would you
consider it sportsmanlike to bet on a sure thing?"

" I don't know about its being sportsmanlike," responded Ben;
"but I'd reckon it darn good judgment."

"But, say," persisted the artist; "would you reckon that a
gamble?"

"Why not?"

" If you're betting on a dead sure thing, there is no element of
chance in the proposition; and when you don't take a chance, it
isn't a gamble. "

"Oh, yes it is," concluded Ben. "I never knew a thing so
sure yet, but a man could slip up on it some way or other."

Three Quiet Days 107

A little later, Mr. Frohman made a series of statements that
may be commended to the serious consideration of ambitious
sports who may entertain any idea of "breaking the bank" in
the "square gambling game" mentioned earlier by the same
gentleman.

"You prided yourself on running a straight game?" he was
asked.

"No. It wasn't a straight game," frankly responded Mr.
Frohman. " It couldn't be."

"Give me a little more information, Ben?" requested his
interlocutor.

"Well, you see, if you're running a game — keeping a bank —
you've got to pay rent, and porter hire, janitor service, pay the
case keeper and the lookout, your own salary, and square the police,
and pay interest on the capital invested. And if you're going to
pay all those running expenses, outside of getting anything for
yourself, you've got to have a percentage in favor of the bank,
and a good big one, or you can't stay in business. That's why there
ain't no such thing as a straight game. There can't be. Gamb-
ling's a business, and the man keeping the bank has to make his
profit on it the same as any other man in business, and that's why
there can't be any such thing as a straight game."

To-morrow, the tenth, the camp moves to Yellowstone, to
await the good pleasure of the more or less uncertain train expected
to leave on the eleventh — at eleven in the morning, or six in the
evening. There is an unconfirmed rumor that it has been known
to leave at eleven a. m. but nobody seems to think the possibility
of its leaving at all enough of a sporting chance to make a bet on.

AN INTERLUDE

Saturday the tenth.

This day the party came into Yellowstone in a heavy hail
storm, that lasted nearly all the way in. William and Jay departed
first under a half clear sky, riding south, and round by Horse Butte
on the chance of scaring up the big head. The storm broke after
Art and the artist, under convoy of Counter, were some three
miles or so on the way. The forerunners were found awaiting
the latter three at the Madison Hotel on arrival at Yellow-
stone, in the evening, they having given up the idea of
hunting as soon as the storm broke, and pushed full speed
for Yellowstone. Fred drove in the wagon with the heavy
trunks and camp impedimenta.

At the Madison was a company of hunters, fishers, ranchmen
and packers, about a dozen in number including our own party.
A comfortable log building, with access to the bedrooms obtained
from a gallery running round three sides of the central hall, it
was a most acceptable haven for the evening, aided by a com-
fortably warm box stove, cards, and a piano, lightly and ten-
tatively fingered by the artist in various fragments of church
music, chants, and a reminiscence of classical balladry. A gram-
ophone on the center table was tended by Miss Stevens, school
teacher, a spectacled, curly haired Montana girl, with ambitions
of a university course and newspaper work subsequently; coupled
with a yearning for European travel. Under her ministration
the evening was enlivened by a continual succession of vocal
solos, arias, and duets from the great continental operas. Talk of
cattle, hunting, and fishing, mingled with some typical western
stories floated about meanwhile. And when bedtime came,
William and the artist bunking together: "A-a-ah" yawned the
artist, recreant to all the traditions of the Red Gods, as he com-
fortably disposed himself for repose upon a spring mattress with
a crisp pillow beneath his head, "This is comfort." And then
came the kindly sleep that, vide the immortal Sancho, "covers
one all over like a cloak."

Page 108

An Interlude 109

Sunday the eleventh.

"Well, William," yawned the artist after lying awake for an

hour, "I guess we might as well get up. There doesn't seem

anything else we can do." Subsequently retailing this to Art

at breakfast the Rabelaisian William put the emphasis on the

we.

Venison and bear steak for breakfast. Venison for dinner
the evening before strengthened the artist's conviction, expressed
to Jay, that he wouldn't be able to look a deer in the face for
the next seventeen years. Then followed repacking of grips,
changing of clothes, and various light employments in prepara-
tion for the expected train, which might or might not come at
eleven or two, or any other time God might please to send it.

At dinner announcement was made of the train's arrival at
two o'clock, interpreted by the wise ones as meaning somewhere
about six if it didn't break down on the way across the divide.
At last came the train, at half past three. Then followed the
business of personally checking baggage, and negotiations for a
ticket for the artist to Ogden, the other two men going on to
Seattle via Idaho Falls and Spokane, and the trio got aboard.
And while the two older travelers, wise in past experience, peace-
fully continued the game that goes on forever, and the artist
by turns roved up and down the car and slept, the engine played
pussy-wants-a-corner with sundry freight cars and the one pas-
senger and baggage car around the freight yard for the next two
hours.

The peculiar isolation of the handful of dwellers in Yellow-
stone, the tourist season closed, is well covered by the statement
that after to-day there are only two trains more, on the 1 8th and
25th of October, on which last date the station agent comes out.
After that there is no railroad communication with the outer world
until some time in May, when the snow leaves the mountain
passes sufficiently to permit traffic. The local general store
carries in its warehouse a six or seven months* stock of the stand-
ard necessities and sundries of the district for the winter.

At nearly half past five the train made a start for Ash ton,
some sixty miles south, over the continental divide. At eight
o'clock this evening after a supper of canned pork and beans,
and cheese on crackers, washed down with strong liquors and

110 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Roddies

water, some distance south of Ray's pass (the crest of the divide),
the engineer pushed a couple of flat cars off the track on a side
switch. All freight and passenger business was promptly aban-
doned. The train crew turned itself into an impromptu wreck-
ing crew. For the next hour and a quarter, while passengers
yawned and queried, slept or talked, or played cards, as did
William and Art, all unmindful of mundane exigencies without
the warm, comfortable and smoky baggage car, the train crew
worked to restore the errant cars to their straight and narrow
way.

Here's a helva clamor of iron upon iron as this is written,
made by the chains, bars, slip-ups and other wrecking apparatus,
being again loaded into the baggage car. Train hands in sleet
dripping waterproofs and hats clamber aboard, a welcome promise
of being again upon our way. They slap their gloves, they gather
about the stove, they stack their lanterns. Some one laughs.
Through the open baggage car door, over my left shoulder I see a
lantern swinging. The engine hoots — far off — for it is a long freight
train with the baggage and passenger coach at the end. We start
and everybody looks pleased and speaks cheerfully.

Men gather at the baggage car door and vainly peer into
the pitchy depths of a sheer walled thousand foot cleft, along
whose brink the train runs for a number of miles, and whose
invisible river is faintly heard from the void above the rattle
of the train, recalling Kipling's Song of the Banjo.

"Through the gorge that gives the stars at noonday clear;
Up the pass that packs the scud beneath the wheel.
Round the bluff that sinks her thousand fathom sheer.
Down the valley with the guttering brakes a-squeal;
Where the trestle groans and quivers in the snow,
And the many shedded levels loop and twine:
So I lead my reckless children from below
To sing the song of Roland to the pine

IVith my tink-a-tink-a-tink-a-tink-a-link-a-tink-a-tink,
Till the ax has cleared the mountain, croup and crest;
And we ride the iron stallions down to drink
Through the canyons to the waters of the west. "

It is ten-thirty-five. The train is fifteen miles from Ash ton.
In five hours it has come forty-five miles. If we do not strike
another car off the track we will be there a little before

An Interlude II f

midnight. The train from Ashton leaves at seven-fifteen in the
morning. We meditate on the prospects of supper and sleep.

"Ashton." Thus the brakeman.

William commands the situation; "I am going to beat it
for the hotel. I know where it is. There's a crowd on the train
and they'll all be wanting rooms. You and Art take your time
and bring along the baggage. I'll have the room for you." It
was so done.

The baggage was deposited at the hotel, startlingly bright
with light, and wide awake at the deserted midnight of a small
mountain town. Then, with William still with a generals' grasp
upon all phases of the situation, we walked up one side of the
main street and down the other in confident quest of supper.
The street is wide and muddy. The buildings are mostly one
story frame store types. There is the inevitable postcard-photo-
graph foundry and a shooting gallery. A cloudy sky is overhead,
there is a warm air, and a star or two is visible under the far
edge of the clouds.

At a half lighted window we stopped. At the far end of a
lunch counter, in a greasily smoky atmosphere, was a group of
fellow travelers in impassioned negotiation with a sleepy but
polite Jap in undershirt and trousers. His day was ended. He
was politely averse to reopening for business at dead midnight.
A dozen hungry men argued and displayed money in vain.
William came quietly into the group and fixed the impassively
polite gentleman of the orient with a persuasive eye. He pulled
forward Art and the artist, and pointing to them held up three
fingers and comprehended the rest of the famished gathering
within a sweep of his hand that terminated with a half seen
swift gesture that made one search memory as to just where
had that been seen before. What freemasonry lay between
them is unknown. Whatever understanding passed, it was
sufficient. The Jap's face lighted with a recognitory gleam.
He bowed: "The honorable gentlemen should be fed without
delay, at a most estimable speed. The honorable pot should
boil, the distinguished T Bone should fry. In half the honorable
hour."

"How do you reckon he does it, Art?" queried the artist^
in the interim before the accomplishment of the meal.

/ 12 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

"Search me, but people do do things for Bill, don't they?
I reckon he must own that Jap. Anyhow, lets be thankful
we're with him."

"He's put it on a cold plate" commented the artist, some-
time later, contemplating a T-bone steak set before him.

"Don't holler," sternly rebuked Bill "You ought to be
blanked thankful you're getting anything at all to eat any
way at all, after the whole outfit's gone to bed. That Jap didn't
want to feed anybody. Jim's getting fussy, coming out from
camp." he went on, addressing Art: "Up at the hotel just now,
when we took our bags up to our room, he went sniffing around
with his nose in the air, and put up a roar because the windows
hadn't been opened since the last traveler slept there day before
yesterday. And that when he didn't know if he was going to
sleep at all to-night. Camp life isn't a good thing for Jimmy.
It's too luxurious — makes him too soft to buck the hardships of
the return to civilization."

We ate. We slept.

FAREWELL TO THE MOUNTAINS

Monday the twelfth.

Probably the most impressive thing the early morning
stroller may see from Ash ton is the Fingers, the three great up-
standing peaks of the Teton range, that before breakfast, in
October one may see dark against the sunrise. They rise from
the plain with a dominant abruptness. One feels their height,
and by the darkness of the soaring points above the snowfields
of the lower slopes, the sheer precipitousness of their sides. The

The "Fingers" from Ashton

highest point, presenting on one side a dead vertical line, and
on the other an abrupt descent, dominates its fellows and the
plain about with a stern majesty that holds long in memory.

Waiting for the train, a man from Pocatello who had been
observed to get on at Yellowstone with a creel, apparently weighty,
mentioned to the artist having taken Loch Leven trout of four
and one-half pounds, and rainbow trout of six pounds on the
main stream of the Madison. Then, perceiving the artist's
occupation, came the inevitable question. Almost invariably
people speaking to an artist during the first few minutes after
meeting him as such, ask him if he knows such and such another
one, probably in their home town, very celebrated for painting
sheep, flowers, or dead poultry, or they tell him of a maiden
aunt who is inexpressibly clever at watercolor.

From Ashton to Pocatello was observed a pleasant farming
country, lying in mountain-bounded, level-floored valleys. For

Page 113

/ 14 Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

some distance before reaching Blackfoot, Idaho, the train ran
through the reservation of the Idaho Blackfoot Indians, whose
farm lands with their dwellings showed a good deal of care and
thrift.

A bunch of tribesmen got on the train at Blackfoot, and
promptly congregated by themselves at the forward end of the
car. The artist, having some slight acquaintance with the Chi-
nook dialect, which at one time formed a universal language
over the northwest quarter of the continent, went forward, and
tried to open communication. With Indian taciturnity they
refused response.

"The moments fly
And the hour is nigh
When thou and I must part.
My dear.
When thou and I must part."

So sang the artist.

"I'm sorry," remarked Art to the artist, "my right side is
going to feel pretty darn lonesome." The artist, throughout the
expedition had at meals sat at Art's right hand.

"Pocatello!"

"Good-bye, Jimmy. Tell 'em in Chicago we'll be home on
the twenty-second. You change at Ogden, and pick up the Los
Angeles limited for home if you can."

And hence, William and Arthur going on to Spokane and
Seattle, the artist journeyed alone through the Idaho valleys. Be-
low Pocatello came a splendid succession of mountain ranges, float-
ing blue in the Indian summer air, across distant benches of hay
land and sage. Asters were still in bloom, and willows and cotton-
woods in full leaf below Pocatello. At Cache Creek, 4,425 feet
above sea level, and forty-nine miles from Ogden, stray butterflies
were still on the wing.

A young Kentuckian, from Cumberland Gap, dropping into
the artist's seat, entertained him for a few miles with a tale of his
courtship of a belle of the district, known locally as the Queen of
the Cumberland Mountains. With circumstantiality of detail
it was set forth how other suitors had tried to run him out of the
country, with various pot shots from behind fences and rocks.
And further, how one evening he had gone calling upon the queen

Farewell to the Mountains 115

of his affections with a Colt seven shot automatic pistol under his
arm, and a Winchester sixteen shot rifle as a staff. He was bom-
barded from the darkness as he left the girl's front gate, dropped
behind a provident rock and answered in the general direction of
the fusillade. The engagement lasted for twenty matter-of-fact
minutes. He failed to specify casualties, if any, or if he eventually
married the lady. His main convictions were that it was a manly
thing to carry arms, and that everybody who held a job better
than his own in the railroad service (he was a freight clerk when he
was working) did so by power of pull and favoritism, the actual
work of the position being done by the men below. He gave this
astonishing parting dictum to the artist: "If you ever go to
Kentucky, you want to go armed. A man feels quite good with a
pistol on his hip or under his arm."

The orchards of Salt Lake valley show apples hanging like
jewels among the foliage. The traveler is impressed with the
orderly, gardened, and kept appearance of it all. It is a thrifty
smiling land, eloquent of industry and prosperity. Everywhere is
the Lombardy poplar, in rows and groups. Every dwelling and
dooryard is sentineled by them, and with them are most noble
groves of cottonwoods, yet in the green of summer. The Colorado
magpie is frequently seen, and flocks of other wild birds rise
continually to the train's passing. The gray hillsides, hazy in
Indian summer, show the aspen and willow groves in bright gold
and orange.

At Baker's were great flats covered with water. The moun-
tains distant in the west sweep to their heights above the flats in a
blue and still splendor.

At Brigham, 4,310 feet, twenty-one miles from Ogden, the
orchards are heavily loaded with red apples. The peaks of the
Wasatch range here rise sheerly from the fruitful plain to snow
capped summits. Their sides show a pale coppery red, with the hol-
lows in a luminous blue shadow. There is no vegetation upon
them, save aspen and cottonwood, but they are beautiful in their
bareness. In the south, the sun being in the west, the mountains
show the same copper red, but seen through a blue haze of
atmosphere.

Winter has been left behind at Yellowstone, and one has come
down into summer in the Salt Lake plain. The grass is goldenly

116

Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies

withered, the sunflowers and cat tails have seeded, the crops have
been carried, the fruit, red-ripe, hangs heavy on the trees, but
summer still lingers.

At Ogden, the Los Angeles limited, bound east, was picked

up on time, the
traveler merely walk-
ing across a track
from one train to the
other.

After leaving
Ogden came a suc-
cession of fresh splen-
dors. Vista on vista
of ranges behind
ranges, the eastern
faces of the moun-
tains above the val-
ley blazing with the
reddening evening
light, the near fore-
ground bluely lumi-
nous in shadow, the
western shoulders
and crags, crowning
in some heaven-
piercing point, in
violet silhouette
against the light-
flooded western
heaven, and the far
off distance at the
end of the pass float-
ing in a golden haze. On the observation platform the departing
sojourner sat, and looked upon the parting splendor, and made
farewell to the mountains, with a fresh and growing thankful-
ness for the kindly fellowship, the appreciative care and sympa-
thetic friendliness of "Art" and of "Bill," whose guest the artist
was, whose debtor he is.

The last glimpse

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